


Roughing It

by Flyting



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Community: tfa_kink, Crack Treated Seriously, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fluff and Crack, Hux is a snarky bastard, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Ren is a drama lord, Slow Burn, The Force Awakens Kinkmeme, and fighting, implied cannibalism of subordinates, survival fic, together they don't die of starvation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 07:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5959048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If anyone had asked Hux to describe ‘hell’, being stranded on a backwater planet with Kylo-fucking-Ren would have come pretty close to the mark.</p><p>For the prompt: Kylo and Hux stranded in the middle of nowhere together and having to reluctantly (crankily snarkily evilly) work together to survive. Hux is Not Amused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

General Hux awakens to blinding light, the beginnings of a stabbing headache, and the overall feeling of having been stuffed into a metal box that was then shaken very hard by some spiteful giant. Even his hair hurts. Various aches and pains present themselves for inspection as he stretches, throwing an arm over his eyes to block out the retina-searing light.  
  
He runs a quick personal assessment, ticking everything off on a mental checklist as he goes.  
  
He was alive, clearly, which was usually a good start to things. Arms, legs, fingers, and toes all seemed to be accounted for. He couldn’t see, but the fading pain in his eyes suggested that was because of the brightness instead of any physical damage. Good.  
  
He is laying on what feels like sand and possibly a small rock. Acceptable.  
  
Could he move? He lifts an arm experimentally. Yes, with difficulty. Again, good.  
  
There is a dry, baking heat in the air which, coupled with the sand, sends a mild warning klaxon up in his mind that he is no longer on board the Finalizer. He tugs at that thought, following it back to its source- he is off the ship, on some planet somewhere, but how and most of all _why_ -  
  
_Ren_.  
  
The name flashes up red in his mind. He reloads his last thought before unconsciousness- _Note to self,_ he had thought as the proximity warning on the shuttle’s computer started to scream; acrid black smoke was pouring out from under the console, and the outer hull had started to tremble- _If I survive I am going to kill Kylo Ren._

The thought fills up the whole of his consciousness. Hux didn’t even have it in him to be angry at the Resistance for launching a strafing attack on the ship just days after the destruction of Starkiller Base, while they were still recouping their losses and trying to assess the damage done. He was still desperately scrambling personnel from every available sector just to organize the recovery efforts. A perfect target. And while their motley assortment of last-generation New Republic fighters and discount smuggling ships couldn’t hope to really take down the crown jewel of the First Order’s fleet, they could certainly cause _problems_.

The Resistance struck while he was weakened and disorganized; kicking the crew of the Finalizer while they were down. He doesn’t really blame them. It’s exactly what he would have done, if the situations were reversed.

They had been targeting any and all essential systems, seemingly causing damage simply for the sake of causing damage, he remembers. Striking and retreating. It should have been nothing he couldn’t handle; they were weakened, but they weren’t defenseless.  

Memory trickles back in. Hux’s own very personal and immediate problems had begun when he was informed, in the midst of preparing to launch their counter-attack, that Lord Ren had just forced his way out of medical against orders and was attempting to commandeer a fighter.  
  
“Then stop him,” he had snapped into the com. He didn’t have time for this. As wonderfully tempting as it was to let the man run off and get himself blown up, Hux had invested a significant amount of effort into rescuing the ungrateful wretch from Starkiller Base. Leader Snoke was expecting Kylo Ren delivered to him personally.  
  
There was a palpable silence from the other end of the com. “… how, sir?”  
  
“Just-“ Hux had paused, gritting his teeth. How indeed?  
  
And he’d said then the words that he knew were going to haunt him for the rest of his life, however brief that was. “I’ll be right there.”

A voice cuts into his hazy recollection, “General? Are you awake, sir?”  
  
Hux gingerly lifts his arm off of his eyes, squinting through the piercing glare at a vague white shape. “So it would seem.” His voice crackles, rough from disuse and smoke inhalation. He coughs, and it feels like his chest has been scoured from the inside.

As his eyes adjust to the light, the white shape resolves itself into a Stormtrooper in scuffed armor. A gloved hand slides under his back, helping Hux sit up. The sand beneath him shifts. “Who are you?” he croaks.  
  
“TR-4022, sir.”  
  
“Where are we, TR-4022?”  
  
“I’m not sure, sir. The planet is Allar. We got caught in the gravitational field as the shuttle went down. I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t see where we hit.”

“You did perfectly fine, TR-4022. What’s the state of the shuttle?”  
  
“Offline, sir. Destroyed. We were lucky to get you out.”  
  
It takes his battered mind a second to process the ‘we’.  
  
“The other trooper that was with you?” Hux asks.  
  
“TR-5983, sir? He… he didn’t make it.”  
  
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Hux says automatically. He feels a momentary twinge of guilt, like an itch.  
  
_“You two, come with me,” he’d said to the first pair of Stormtroopers to cross his path as he stalked down to the fighter bay._  
  
“He will, of course, receive full combat honors.” Then he groans, his scratched throat causing the sound to come out more like a wheeze. “Ren? I don’t suppose you’ve done me a favor and died too?” He calls. A small, hopeful part of Hux is already halfway preparing the speech he will give to Leader Snoke and the rest of the Order. ‘We’re all very saddened by Lord Ren’s passing. It was an unavoidable tragedy. His memory lives on…’ He wonders if he could get through it without laughing.

 _Every TIE fighter that could fly was already out there shooing off the Resistance fighters like flies from a carcass. He’d found Lord Ren attempting to steal a small armed transport shuttle, designed to escort their smaller freighters._  
  
_“Get out of there right now,” he’d called up into the open hatch crossly, feeling more like the nursemaid to a particularly bratty child than a First Order General. “You do not have authorization to take this craft, Ren. It’s unnecessary. The fighters are handling it.”_  
  
_The shuttle’s engines began to power up. “Ren? I know you hear me.” Hux had stormed up the gangplank, the two Stormtroopers dogging his heels nervously._  
  
_“She’s out there with them. I can feel it.” Ren had growled, talking more to himself than to Hux. He had gotten his mask back somewhere, although the voice regulator didn’t do much to hide the anxiety in his tone. He was itching for a fight; the air around him practically crackling with energy. His gloved hands flew through the start-up sequence._  
  
_“Who, your desert rat?”_  
  
_“She’s taunting me.”_  
  
_“I don’t care if she does a striptease in front of you and throws her underwear in your face, you-“_

_The floor beneath them lurched as the shuttle lifted off._

“Care to try your luck again, General?” Ren's voice is disappointingly clear, and comes from somewhere off to Hux’s right.  
  
Wonderful.


	2. Chapter 2

_“Last chance to get off, General. If you hurry you might just make the jump.”_  
  
_“Ren, if you don’t land this ship right now-“_  
  
_Ren wasn’t listening. Ren was never fucking listening. He was nosing the shuttle out of the hanger doors._  
  
Hux snarls at the memory, banging his fist against the fire-blackened shuttle console. It doesn’t so much as beep. The thing was destroyed- little more than a twisted pile of junk now. It was a miracle the three of them had gotten out alive, all things considered. One entire wing had been torn off during entry of the atmosphere, exposing the interior to the harsh desert around them. Sand was already beginning to accumulate around his feet. Sand was beginning to accumulate everywhere, he was discovering.  
  
“It wasn’t a miracle,” Ren’s voice says from behind him.  
  
“What have I told you about staying out of my head?” Hux says, without any particular venom. He has reached his saturation point when it came to hating Kylo Ren. There was simply no more room in him.  
  
There is sound of metal-on-metal as Ren pulls up one of the floor panels and begins rooting around in the space underneath with one long arm. He’s lost the mask; ether in the crash or in deference to the parching heat. The scar bisecting his face is still faintly pink, though fading at the edges. Absurdly, Hux notices that Ren's hair is beginning to frizz from the heat.  
  
Hux had never seen Kylo Ren without the mask until recently.  The boyish face underneath had been... not what he was expecting. Hux had been responsible for the revolutionizing of the Stormtrooper training system. He had seen literally millions of troops pass through his program. Masks were commonplace. Nearly comforting in their blank uniformity.  
  
The mask suited Ren better than the face did, he decided. Those eyes belonged to someone sweet. Someone soft. Not Ren.  
  
“I was able to cushion our landing, such as it was,” Ren says, extracting a medkit from the compartment under the floor grating and laying it to the side. Hux makes a noise just to signify that he’s heard him. He hadn’t missed the way Ren had turned away from him at their last dual meeting with Leader Snoke. The way he had kept his eyes firmly fixed forward, as if daring the General to say something about his exposed face.  
  
Well, whatever issues he had with it before, Ren seems to have come to terms with them. He watches Hux, curiously, his arm still buried in the guts of the shuttle.  
  
“It’s just a pity I didn’t have time to save more of the ship,” he says, withdrawing his empty hand. “You’re welcome, by the way.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“Saving your life.”  
  
Ren hefts the medkit and stands.  
  
“ _Saving my life_?” he says to Ren’s retreating back. “I didn't hear you thanking _me_ when I dragged your sorry carcass off of Starkiller Base after that girl nearly killed you.”  
  
It’s petty and petulant, he knows. Beneath him. Still, he is hot and irritated, and Ren is trying his last frayed nerve.  
  
“You were under orders,” Ren says simply, without turning to look at him. Out of the corner of his eye, Hux catches sight of TR-4022 focusing very, very hard on sorting through the wreckage of their debris field. Good man.  
  
“It still counts,” Hux adds before Ren can argue, pursuing him over the sand dunes that surround the shuttle, “And another thing- one very important thing, Ren. _My life wouldn’t have needed saving_ if it weren’t for your pathetic wounded ego and lack of self-control. If you hadn’t been itching for a rematch with the little girl who _beat you_ -“  
  
Suddenly Hux cannot breathe. He chokes, clutching at the invisible hand closed around his throat.  
  
“I would think very hard about my next words if I were you, General. I can always say you died in the crash,” Ren says, curling his fingers.  
  
Off to the side, TR-4022 is humming noisily to himself.  
  
Hux glares impotently until Ren releases him. He hopes, for just a moment, that Ren is reading his thoughts right now, and lingers on some carefully culled ones involving Ren’s mother and a bantha just in case.  
  
“What now, then?” Ren says, after a few minutes have passed, seemingly, disappointingly, unaware of Hux’s dark thoughts.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“You’re the tactician. How do we get back to the ship?”  
  
Hux runs a hand over his face, trying to soothe away the frayed edges of his headache. His skin is already turning red and warm from the unending sun. “We find a way to signal for help.”  
  
“How do we do that?”  
  
Were he anyone else, Hux might be irritated at the assumption that he must single-handedly orchestrate their escape. As it is, Hux has been considering just that for nearly an hour now, building up a checklist of options and contingencies. This was his element.  
  
“Well, the ship is shot,” Hux says, working his way through his mental list. “There’s no way we’ll muster enough power to activate the distress beacon, even if it somehow managed to still be able to hold a signal.”  
  
Hux progresses to plan B. “Can you, I don’t know, contact Leader Snoke through the Force or something?”  
  
Ren appears thoughtful.  
  
“Not at this distance, no” he says. “I can send out a sort of general distress cry that might reach the Finalizer. If so, I could guide the ship to our location. But…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“There’s no way of targeting the crew of the Finalizer specifically.”  
  
“Which means what, to those of us who didn’t go to magic school?”  
  
Ren frowns at him, blowing air out through his nose, but Hux cannot tell if it is because of what he is about to say or because of the ‘magic’ crack. “It means that any force-sensitive person in the area might hear it.”  
  
“Ah,” Hux says. “Such as your desert rat.”  
  
“Or General Organa,” Ren adds, coldly.  
  
_Well we don’t want mummy running to your rescue, do we?_ Hux thinks sourly, to cover up the disappointment he feels at the unsuitability of this plan. It had been his favorite, because it so neatly shifted responsibility for their rescue onto the one who stranded them in the first place. But they’re in no state to fight off the Resistance should the wrong person come running to Ren’s psychic distress cry, and he doesn't feel like adding 'captured by the enemy' to his mental list of ways that today has gone horribly wrong. Damn. Which left plan C.  
  
“There’s a village within a... sizable walking distance of here. I saw it on the readout as the ship was going down. This is a pre-industrial planet, but once we get there I’m confident I can scrap together a transmitter so long as we take the targeting crystals from the ship. “  
  
“How 'sizable' of a distance?”  
  
Hux shakes the sand out of his brain and runs a few quick mental calculations, “Three weeks brisk walk?”  
  
Ren looks around them at the endless expanse of desert and Hux cannot help but follow his gaze. Reddish-gold sand stretches in every direction, unchanging, seemingly to the very edge of the horizon. Hux isn’t exactly enthused about this plan either.  
  
“General? Lord Ren?” TR-4022 interjects hesitantly. “If- if I may, sirs, there’s one problem.”  
  
“Yes, TR-4022?” Hux prompts.  
  
“The emergency ration kits appear to be… gone, sir.”  
  
It was his own arrangement. Every shuttle contained a week’s survival rations- nutrient paste and a water condensation module, designed to pull moisture out of the air- for every essential crew-member. It was intended for occasions just such as this.  
  
“I’m worried it may have blown out during out descent, sirs. I’ve found one of the water condensers, but none of the food rations. “  
  
Ren’s mouth quirks in what might have been a humorless smile. It sits awkwardly on his face, like a guest that knows it isn’t welcome.  
  
“Three weeks walk,” he echoes, “How good are you at hunting?"


	3. Chapter 3

“Hunting _what_?” Hux says, gesturing at the empty desert around them. It isn’t a very precise gesture, more of a flailing arm-wave, but it doesn’t have to be. There is a lot of desert around to catch it.

“Good question,” Ren actually sighs.  
  
They stand there glaring at each other for a moment.

“Well, one problem at a time," Hux says. "TR-4022?”  
  
“Yes, sir?”  
  
“Keep searching the debris. Look for another water condenser. Anything else you find in working order, set it aside. I’ll go through it later.” He files away their list of potential escape plans and switches to mentally organizing a list of necessary supplies. They would need water foremost, but also the means to make shelter, to make a fire, and, hopefully, the means to kill any small, tasty-looking desert dwelling creatures that crossed their path.  
  
The Stormtrooper salutes.

What were his assets? That was always step one.

He had one water condenser. Acceptable. Not ideal, but enough to live on.  
  
The ship itself. It may not function, but it was a wealth of parts that could be re-purposed into supplies. Good.  
  
He had Ren. Much as Hux loathed to think of the man as anything resembling an ‘asset’, his old-world sorcerer nonsense could prove useful.  
  
“Have you still got that ridiculous light-sword of yours?” Hux asked Ren, deliberately misnaming his precious weapon just to needle the man.  
  
“It… took some damage in the crash, but I think I can fix it.”  
  
“So that would be ‘no’, then?”  
  
The one time he actually wanted Ren to have the damn thing. Hux’s hand creeps up to press gingerly at the back of his neck while he thinks. The skin there is already starting to feel like it’s on fire. He prods at it, testing the sting.  
  
“It’s the sun,” Ren offers, nodding at Hux’s probing hand.  
  
“ _I know what it is,”_ Hux snaps.  
  
It was the reason why he had absolutely hated going planetside, even as a boy. Even the smallest amount of time spent in direct sunlight left him feeling seared, his skin going redder than his hair and burning for days. He hated planets. Hated the noise, the dirt, the sun _._ As far as Hux was concerned, ‘weather’ was something that should only happen to other people. Give him a clean, organized, efficient, climate-controlled spaceship every time.  
  
He wasn’t suited for this- the thought hits him like one of Phasma’s infamous right-hooks- he wasn’t suited for camping and walking and sleeping outdoors. He was _allergic to sunlight for fuck’s sake.  
  
_ Ren makes an irritated sound in his nose and rolls his eyes, actually _rolls his eyes_ , like an affronted teenager whose parent has just started telling that story about them in the bathtub for the hundredth time. Hux is not entirely proud of the fact that he jumps back –call it _survival instincts_ rather than base cowardice- when the other man reaches up, but it is only to unclasp the heavy black cape that’s still over his shoulders. Then everything goes dark as the cape is flung over Hux’s head.  
  
“Wear it- it’ll keep the sun off you,” Ren grumbles as Hux sputters, fighting his way out from beneath yards of heavy fabric.  
  
The cape is heavy, stiflingly hot, and smells strongly of _Kylo Ren_ \- that is, of metal polish, regulation soap, and a dark coppery scent that Hux optimistically classifies as ‘rust’- but with the hood pulled up over his head, he is blissfully shaded from the sun.

* * *

 

  
They make a fire that night in the looming shadow of the twisted wreckage of their shuttle. Hux and TR-4022 huddle around it, Hux still wrapped up in the cape even though the planet’s one yellow sun has long since gone down. Ren sits some distance away from them, sulking in a convenient puddle of darkness cast by the ship. His brow is furrowed in concentration as he prods at his lightsaber with a laser spanner that TR-4022 had pulled out of the debris. The lightsaber was spread apart across the sand, like an animal being dissected. Every now and again it crackled or sparked as he stabbed at it.  
  
“This is very nearly civilized,” Hux says, after running through several possible options for the best thing to say to at least attempt to boost their collective morale. His tone aims for confident and unruffled, and only barely hits its mark.  
  
“Yes, sir,” TR-4022 agrees. He had pulled off his gloves, the better to warm his hands over the fire, but left the helmet on. It was a fairly common personal tic amongst those who had completed the new program. Their training stressed uniformity nearly from birth. By the time they were grown, they felt naked without it.

He wonders, idly, if Ren felt the same way without his mask.  
  
“So what is it you do on board the ship, TR-4022?” Hux asks, just to break the quiet.  
  
“Sector patrol, sir. Decks twelve and thirteen.” The firelight glows red in the eyepieces of his helmet.  
  
“I rarely hear about problems from those decks. You must do your job well.”  
  
From the shadows, Hux hears a disdainful little snort. He isn’t sure if it’s directed at them or at the vivisected lightsaber. He ignores Ren. There was a reason his training program has shown unprecedented levels of success throughout the galaxy. Leading through fear and intimidation, and messily slaughtering anyone who failed you might work for the Knights of Ren, but Hux knew that you couldn’t hope to control an army that numbered in the millions by threats alone. Sometimes you had to do demeaning, undignified things like _actually_ _talk to them_.  
  
“Thank you, sir. I try, sir.”  
  
“Are you aiming for patrol leader one day?”  
  
“Well… actually, sir, I’ve been hoping for a transfer.”  
  
“Yes?” Hux prompts, with as much interest as he can muster. He doesn’t particularly care, but his options for conversation at the moment are limited.

TR-4022 hesitates, hanging his head. “Well, I’d like to work… in the kitchens, sir.”  
  
“There’s nothing wrong with that. An army needs chefs as well as soldiers.” Hux says.  
  
“You think so, sir?”  
  
“Of course.  
  
“I’ve… well, I have always liked cooking, sir,” TR-4022 says, as though he’s confessing some great shame. “When I was in primary, I used to dream about being the head chef for the officer’s mess hall. Feeding the generals and leaders. ”  
  
“Well, it’s good to have a dream. It gives you focus. Motivation.” The darkness makes another disdainful sound. Hux ignores it. “When I was a boy, mine was to be a fighter pilot.”  
  
The fire crackles.  
  
“No, it wasn’t,” Ren says after a moment, speaking up for the first time in hours. Just when Hux was blissfully beginning to forget the sound of his voice.  
  
“Wasn’t what?” Hux says.  
  
“You wanted to be Emperor.”  
  
Hux feels his jaw clench. “I’ll thank you to stay out of my head, Lord Ren. It’s possible I might have entertained some silly thoughts along those lines when I was very small, but I dismissed them in favor of something much more practical.”  
  
“You would make an excellent Emperor, sir,” TR-4022 says, loyally.  
  
“Thank you. I’m sure you’ll make an exemplary chef. I’ll look into the transfer when we return.”  
  
“Thank you, sir!”

 _There_ , Hux thinks, satisfied. Thoughts of his upcoming transfer should serve to keep the Stormtrooper distracted from their tenuous situation, at least for a while. The first step to failure was allowing your troops to succumb to panic. _A good leader understands that, Ren._  
  
“Tell him why you wanted to be Emperor,” Ren says, quietly. “It’s really very fascinating."  
  
Whatever parts of Hux that aren’t already red from the sun go faintly pink. His skin crawls a little, the way it always does when he feels Ren slithering around the edges of his mind.  
  
“No? I can tell him,” Ren says. “You wanted to be Emperor so that you could finally make everyone do everything _right._ You thought that if people would only do things properly, the way you told them, everything would be so much better. No more chaos, no more messy disorder. An entire galaxy-“  
  
“- _Thank you_ , Lord Ren. And what about you, then?” Hux fires back nastily. “Was there anything you dreamed of being when you were young, or has it always been black robes and slaughtering rebels? Did you ever want to be anything other than Snoke's attack dog?”

The lightsaber sparks wildly.  
  
“I see,” Hux breathes. “I’m going to sleep. TR-4022, I suggest you do the same. We’ll start out at first light.”  
  
He dumps the cape on Ren's lap as he sweeps past him into the hollowed-out ship.  
  
“A smuggler,” Ren says so quietly as he passes that Hux is not even sure he really heard him.


	4. Chapter 4

They start out at dawn, keeping the sun to their left. A fortnight of walking in this direction and they should, with any luck, be close enough for Lord Ren to sense the exact location of the village Hux had seen on the shuttle’s scanners.  
  
He doesn’t recall the length of this planet’s rotation period, so he isn’t entirely sure how long they walk. With the hood of the cape up over his head, shielding him from the worst of the sun, all he can do is stare at the never-ending sea of shifting red-gold sand beneath his feet. It reminds him of being a cadet, and forced marches at all hours of the day. Nothing to do but allow your mind to drift while your body pressed on.  
  
They don’t speak, except to ask one another to pass the water condenser. Ren has been mercifully silent since they awoke, if indeed he had even bothered to sleep at all. TR-4022 had joined Hux in the shuttle just a few minutes after he turned in, lying a respectful distance away on the metal bulkhead. Hux lay there in the dark, his greatcoat wrapped around him like a blanket, listening to the hollow sounds of the wind, the shifting sand, and the other man’s breathing, until he slipped into a fitful sleep.  
  
TR-4022 starts to stumble when the sun is still approximately 15 degrees from the very center of the sky.  
  
“Lets take a rest,” Hux says, before the stormtrooper can put them all through the indignity of collapsing completely in front of his General and a Knight of Ren. In truth, his own body is screaming for a break too. The slung pack he wears has begun to cut into his shoulder, and his skin is burning even with the cape. Hux drops next to TR-4022, who has his helmet off and his head between his knees. The stormtrooper has brown hair, now stuck down with sweat.

 Hux leans his head back. The muscles in his legs tingle and pop, like the engine of a skimmer cooling down after a long flight.  
  
“Ren,” he calls, hoarse, when the other man continues on ahead. “Stop.”  
  
“I don’t need to rest,” he says, without looking back.  
  
“Well I do, _stop_.”

Hux growls under his breath, forcing his wobbly legs to take his weight again, when Ren keeps walking. “For once in your life, would you listen to me?“ Ren swings around, arms flying out to balance him, when Hux lays a hand on his shoulder.  
  
“We’re never going to make it if you keep _stopping!_ ” Ren snarls, suddenly furious. He stumbles like a drunk, slipping on the shifting sand. A fleck of dried white spittle clings to the corner of his mouth.

Hux takes in his glassy eyes, his ragged breathing. He sighs. “Sit,” he orders, pressing down on Ren’s shoulders. Surprisingly, the man does, landing heavily on the sand, his long legs splayed out in front of him.  
  
“I’m fine- I’m-“ he stammers, staring up at Hux as if he has no idea who he is or why he’s there.  
  
“You’re not.” To emphasize his point, Hux pushes him back gently with one hand until Ren is lying, half sprawled on the dune behind him. “You’re pushing yourself too hard, and you’re baking in this outfit.” Ren’s clothes, and indeed his own uniform, had been designed for the perpetual winter at Starkiller base, not this. He should have known Ren would be either too proud or too stupid to concede to the heat when it became too much for him.  
  
Hux had discarded his own outer layers that morning, bundling them up and stuffing them into the rudimentary pack he had made by folding up his greatcoat and tying it crosswise along his body. It was not exactly comfortable, with Ren’s heavy cape thrown over his tight-fitting undershirt, but it was at least a great deal better than it could have been.  
  
The cape had been left in a pile next to where Ren had been sitting the previous night, and Hux had had no compunctions about taking it.  
  
“Stopit, Hux,” Ren mumbles crossly as the general’s hands go for his belt, pulling it off him and discarding it.

“Don’t read anything into this,” Hux says wryly, dropping to one knee as he peels the outer layers of material off of him. Not immediately seeing any sort of fastening, he yanks the robe off up over Ren’s head, where it catches around his ears. Ren struggles weakly, muttering complaints as he fights to untangle himself from the fabric. Hux goes to work on the buttons of the black doublet underneath, pushing it off his shoulders and tugging it down his arms, until Ren is lying there in nothing but his dark linen undershirt and pants. The undershirt clings to him where it is soaked-through with sweat. Hux can feel heat radiating off his body like a furnace.  
  
“TR-4022, bring me the water.” I should be getting double-pay, Hux thinks sourly. General and First Order Nursemaid. _Note to self: discuss that with Snoke when we get back. Bonus pay owed re: care and feeding of his pet Force wizard._ He nearly laughs, aware that the heat is making him ridiculous, but unable to really do anything about it.

Ren is ventilating roughly, dragging in great shaky breaths. He reaches up with one clumsy hand and drags the collar of his undershirt down away from his throat. The skin there is splotchy and red.  
  
“Is he going to be okay, sir?” TR-4022 asks nervously, passing him the condenser. He’s replaced his helmet.  
  
“He should recover with a little rest,” he says. In truth, Hux has no idea if Ren is about to keel over as they speak, but he must at least seem to know what he’s doing.  “He’ll still be Ren, but there’s nothing we can do about that,” he adds, joking weakly.  
  
TR-4022 doesn’t laugh. Hux doesn’t blame him. It wasn’t one of his more brilliant quips.  
  
“Drink it slowly,” Hux says firmly, holding Ren’s glassy stare at he wraps the other man’s fingers around the bottle. “Do you hear me? It’s all we’ve got for the moment. We can’t afford for you to sick it all back up.” The water condensers worked by pulling moisture out of the air and collecting it in a reservoir. They were remarkably efficient, but even the best technology could only do so much with the arid atmosphere around them. It was taking hours for the reservoir to refill itself when it should have taken minutes.  
  
Ren nods weakly, still breathing in heaving gasps. His throat makes a dry clicking sound as he swallows.

Somehow, that easy compliance unnerves Hux more than any amount of raging or screaming ever has. Even bleeding out on the snow on Starkiller, Ren had still found the energy to argue with him.  
  
Perhaps Ren really was dying. It seemed the sort of thing he’d do- die at the most inconvenient moment possible for Hux. He suddenly regrets not committing that eulogy to memory.

Groaning, Hux allows himself to collapse onto the sand beside Ren. This heat was making it impossible to think. _Unnecessary_ , that’s what it was. Completely unnecessary. Wasn’t the purpose of a climate was to sustain life? What possible point was there to a dry, scrappy little desert where the sun and the sand- the planet itself- were conspiring to murder you?  
  
_I’ve killed your kind before_ , he thinks crossly, glancing up at the sun from under the hood of Ren’s cape, _don’t make me do it again._

He’s being silly, he realizes. Half-finished, pointless thoughts rattle around in his mind, bouncing off of each other in little flashes of impulse and recollection. It was the heat.

On top of that, his stomach is growling.

After a moment, TR-4022 sits heavily on Hux’s other side. A fine trio they were. The pride of the First Order, disheveled and panting, beaten by a _planet_.  
   
There was nothing else to be done while it was so insufferably hot. Hux leans back, shifting his pack out from behind him. He pulls the cowl of the cape down over his eyes to shade himself, and, to his own surprise, sleeps.


	5. Chapter 5

When he wakes, retreating from dreams of a lavish banquet that he isn’t allowed to touch, the sun has already disappeared below the horizon. The air has cooled to something almost pleasant, though with a barest edge of a chill that suggests it will be getting colder in the very near future. Hux bundles the cape up around his shoulders, curling in on himself.

The cold and darkness sends up a polite warning signal in the back of his mind. It’s a moment before he remembers why they are important.  
  
Cold. Darkness. _Night_.  
  
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asks, sitting up and shaking off the light dusting sand that’s accumulated over him. “We’ve lost half the day.”  
  
“You needed the sleep,” Ren says, from somewhere close by. Hux struggles to pick him out of the darkness. Ren is sitting facing away from him; an indefinite black shape against the stars.

 “What I _need_ is to get back to my ship,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.

How _is_ he feeling? Stronger. The pain in his muscles has retreated to a dull ache, and his head feels sharper, clearer, out of the heat. Good. It was like recovering from a night of drunkenness, when you only truly realize how impaired you had been the night before in the cold light of your morning hangover. _Did I really threaten the sun?_

Ren may have been right. The thought sits there, settling awkwardly into his mind. Behind it, a door leading to the entire world of horrifying possibilities that entails. He skirts around it for the moment.

In addition to feeling rested, he feels filthy and thoroughly disgusting, but he doesn’t count those against Ren’s tally. His shirt peels off of him when he moves, where it is stuck on with dried sweat. He itches all over; can only imagine what he smells like. Verdict? _Terrible_. But a bath and a shave will cure that easily enough, once they get home.

On the bright side, his stomach has stopped twisting itself into hungry knots, which he would classify as _Good,_ but he suspects that it’s only because his body is getting tired of sending him signals which are being ignored. A headache is crystalizing in the space between his eyes. He presses two fingers there, gently. That would be the dehydration.

“Do you still have the water, Ren?”  
  
There is no response, but a moment later he makes out the sim shape of the condenser hovering in the air beside his head. Hux doesn’t waste the strength rolling his eyes. He plucks the bottle out of the air, like taking it from an invisible hand, and drinks deeply. _Slowly-_ he reminds himself after finishing half the water in a few large swallows. _May as well make it last._  
  
Hux wonders, briefly, how the Finalizer is faring without them. It is surprising how much the thought stings. He trusts his officers- if he didn’t, they wouldn’t be there- and in the absence of both himself and Kylo Ren, Lieutenant Mitaka will have already assumed acting command until a permanent successor could be appointed.  
  
He has no intention of that becoming necessary.  
  
Reassessment of the original plan. He has slept from midday to sunset. They will need to cover an average of .3% more ground each day than his original estimate- not unreasonable, but _still_ \- to make up for the loss. Hux will not spend even a day more than is necessary on this planet.

“Do you think… will they be looking for us, sir?” TR-4022 chimes up softly, from his other side. The dull starlight reflects off the white of his armor, illuminating him like a beacon in the darkness.

  _He stays away from Ren_ , Hux notes, idly, taking another drink. _Always manages to keep me in-between them._ Clever man. As a buffer? Or perhaps a shield to deflect the worst of Ren’s temper, should it come to that? He isn’t exactly surprised. His men may have had a healthy fear and respect for him, but they were _pants-soiling_ _terrified_ of Kylo Ren.  The masked Knights of Ren were the boogeymen in stories old Imperial families told their children to make them behave. Hux had gotten a few of them himself, as a boy.  
  
Meeting Kylo had been… almost a disappointment, really.  
  
Under duress, Hux might admit that he _fears_ Kylo Ren, but it is fear suddenly finding himself decapitated in one of the man’s frequent rages, not fear of some fairytale monster. He’d be an idiot not to be afraid of a spoiled child with an infamously bad temper and the ability to murder with a thought, particularly when he’s expected to work in such close quarters with him.  
  
Though perhaps the next time Ren tries to intimidate him, he will call to mind the image of him dazed and breathless with his robes tangled around his head. He will, at least, die amused.  
  
“Sir?” The Stormtrooper prompts.

“No, of course not,” Ren says, a bit irritably, while Hux Is still trying to script a tactful way of understating the severity of their situation. “It’s possible Leader Snoke will sense that I’m still alive and send someone to retrieve me. But as far as the Order is concerned, we were hit by the enemy, our ship completely destroyed on impact with a planet. Without a distress beacon, they will assume we’re dead.”  
  
TR-4022 says nothing.

“And whose fault is that?” Hux asks, coldly.

“Mine,” Ren says back, matching his tone. He pauses. “But your presence here is your own fault.”  
  
Hux gapes for a moment in stunned outrage, his jaw clenching. “And just _how_ did you come to that conclusion?”  
  
“I didn’t ask you to come with me. You had no business being on that shuttle,” Ren says simply.  
  
“It’s _my_ shuttle, which you were _taking without orders_ to chase after some girl-”  
  
“And that required the General himself to personally come down there and stop me? To remain on the shuttle even though I gave you repeated opportunities to get off? You did it because you like to badger me. If you had stayed on your beloved ship and left me to carry out my orders, you wouldn’t be here.”  
  
There is a hard rustling of armor as TR-4022 shifts uncomfortably next to him. Hux sits there for a moment, dazed into silence as he processes the sheer amount of mental gymnastics it must have taken to come to such a belief. _Nothing has ever been his fault in his life, has it?_ Hux thinks, bitterly. His lips press together in a hard line. He wishes, briefly, that they had a fire, or any sort of light, so that he could see Ren’s face. He wants to see what’s in those eyes right now.  
  
“You’re right, Lord Ren” he says, quite calmly, after opening and closing his mouth a few times. “I’m responsible for mine and TR-4022’s presence here. I’ll accept that. ”  
  
“Next time, I will leave you to die and save myself the trouble,” he adds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter, but this weekend has been exceptionally busy. I'm so pleased that people love TR-4022 so much! Giving the Stormtroopers such distinct personalities was one of the best things TFA did, imo.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize in advance to all the TR-4022 fans.

The fourth time he startles awake at nothing, Hux gives up on the idea of sleep entirely. He lays back in the dark, breathing deeply through his nose, and tries not to feel like he is drowning in the ocean of stars hanging over his head.

Hux knew academically that space was immense. Knew it the same obvious way he knew that water was wet, fire was hot, and that Kylo Ren was created by a vengeful power solely to test his self-control. He had just never _felt_ that vastness so acutely before.

It was too big, too much, stretching out over his head like that. In comparison, he is a small, fragile thing, surrounded by nothing but howling emptiness. How does this tiny little nothing planet manage to expand until it feels like it takes up the whole of the universe? He doesn’t understand it. Doesn’t really want to understand it; simply wants to _make it stop._  
  
An inner voice that sounds suspiciously like his father reminds him that it _isn’t_ going to stop until he gets back to the ship, and nothing he does will change that, so he may as well stop complaining about it. It makes him feel like he is six years old again and crying about a scraped knee.  
  
_Does being upset about it achieve anything?_ No.

 _Stop whining then, and fix the problem._  
  
Hux turns over on his side so he doesn’t have to look at the sky anymore, rearranging the coat serving as his pillow so that the buttons are no longer digging into his neck. The growth on his cheek scratches against the fabric.  
  
It is dark, but not dark enough that he cannot see. The stars, he realizes belatedly. He is seeing by starlight. Hux files that new information away for later. It was never this dark on Starkiller. The base had always been swarming with construction, with activity.  
  
To his right, Ren is sound asleep- or whatever it is he does in place of sleep; meditating, communing-with-his-ancestors, who knows- statue-still, with his hands folded neatly over his stomach. Hux wonders if he uses the Force to make himself comfortable. He can’t imagine how anyone can sleep so calmly in this _emptiness._ Behind him, TR-4022 shifts around on the sand, making little whuffling noises in his sleep.

He adds ‘walls’, ‘doors’, and ‘privacy’ to the list he is forming of things he never fully appreciated about the _Finalizer._ Hot water and regular meals are at the top of the list. Laundry and climate control are somewhere below.  
  
Hux spends the rest of the night refining and organizing the list, so as not to have to think about either the empty desert around him or his earlier exchange with Ren, and listening to the endless, hollow sounds of the wind blowing across the sand.

 

* * *

 

They make good time the next day; up and moving as soon as the sun touches the horizon. They stop well before the hottest part of the afternoon- Hux is a firm believer in learning quickly from his own mistakes- at the edge of a massive rocky outcropping that rises up jaggedly from the desert sand. It’s ugly and brown, but at least it’s a break from the endless red-gold sand.

He finds a corner of shade in the shadow of large rock and sits, bracing his back against the stone.  
  
“I’m going to have a look around, sir,” TR-4022 says. “To see if there’s anything to eat.”  
  
“Fine,” Hux calls back. Out of sight of the others, he lets his head drop forward, pressing his fingertips against his forehead. The headache that’s been threatening him half the morning has finally mounted its attack. This one has nothing to do with dehydration. He’s starving. In the most irritatingly literal sense of the word.

He has delayed addressing the problem of food, simply because where there should be a plan- an range of options- _something_ \- there is instead only a blank space in his mind punctuated with a question mark. They haven’t seen another living thing since they crashed. Not a plant, not an insect. Fact: _There was nothing to eat._  
  
The officer’s mess had served eggs the morning he’d left the Finalizer, he remembers, suddenly. Real ones, not the rubbery muck the food synthesizers passed out to the bulk of the crew. With fried bread and real butter. Fresh milkberries from Coruscant, the kind that were tart on the outside and then sugar-sweet when they burst in your mouth. The memory makes his mouth water traitorously.

Hux had skipped breakfast that morning to put a dent in the claims reports he had to file regarding the loss of Starkiller Base, thinking that he would order lunch later. He seethes hatred at himself from the future.  
  
With his head in his hands, it takes Hux a few seconds to realize that something is blocking out the light directly in front of him.  
  
“He’s not going to find anything,” Ren says.  
  
“I know,” Hux replies, not looking up.  
  
“Then you know we won’t make it much farther without food.”  
  
“I _know_ ,” Hux says again, an edge of warning creeping into his tone.  
  
There is a pause, and a sound like someone forcing air out through their nose. The shape looming over him crouches.  
  
“Your head again?” Ren asks, not-quite gently.  
  
“Yes.” An irrational little part of him wants to tell Ren to stand up again- him blocking out the light had been helping.  
  
“Here,” Ren says, and there is the awareness of a hand hovering beside his head. “Let me-“  
  
“What are you- ow!” Hux yelps, eyes shooting open, when there is a painful _tug_ at something inside his mind, like someone had grabbed ahold of his headache and yanked on it.  
  
“Don’t fight me. You’re going to make it worse.”  
  
“ _You’re_ making it worse, Ren. _Get out_ ,” He grits out. His vision is blurring around the edges.  
  
“ _Relax_ , General,” Something unseen strokes down the center of his back and Hux’s body relaxes _,_ going slack like a string had been cut. He lets out an undignified little groan of pleasure. There is a sudden pressure at the base of his spine and between his ears, and the headache clears, dissipating like a drop of blood in water.

He looks up at Kylo Ren, abruptly aware of how close they are. That, in itself, was nothing new. Ren used his size like a schoolyard bully. He was forever looming over Hux’s shoulder or leaning into his face with they disagreed, resorting to base physical intimidation to get his way.  
  
Without the barrier of the mask, and with his hair hanging in lank, frizzy tendrils around his face, it has rather lost some of its effect. The skin on the bridge of Ren’s nose is starting to peel. He has freckles.  
  
Hux has noticed his own multiplying like some exotic plague down his arms the longer he spends out in this kriffing sun. His face is probably just as bad.  
  
“…thank you,” he says slowly, warily, still half-waiting for the ambush. He rolls his neck a little, testing the new-found relief. Whatever Ren had done, it felt amazing.  
  
Ren cants his head just a bit in acknowledgement and stands, suddenly very busy with brushing the sand off of his pants. “That leaves us even.”  
  
“What?”  
  
He seems exasperated- or perhaps it’s embarrassed- at having to explain himself. “Your… assistance yesterday. I know I didn’t thank you.”  
  
“You usually don’t.”  
  
Ren’s lips are a tight line. “Consider this my thanks, then. Try not to have another outburst. It was embarrassing for someone of your rank.”  
  
“My apologies. In the future, I will leave any and all embarassing emotional outbursts to you, Lord Ren.”  
  
Those lips twitch in something that could almost, technically be considered a smile. In the same sense that the inbred dianoga in the level six trash compactor could almost, technically be considered a member of his crew. That is- only by the broadest definition of the term, and you weren’t going to see it winning any commendations for its performance, at that.

When TR-4022 returns, Hux is reclining in the shade of an overhanging rock, trying to snatch a few minutes of sleep with the hood of the cape up over his face. Ren is sitting cross-legged by his feet, piecing together the parts of the lightsaber spread out in front of him.

“Did you find anything?” he asks eventually, not looking up.

“No, sir,” TR-4022 answers nervously. “This rock turns into what looks like a ridge just up ahead. It’s going to be tough to get over. But I didn’t see any native life, sir. I’m starting to wonder if we’re the only living things out here.”

 _That’s how Ren knew,_ Hux thinks, the thought satisfying some minor sticking point that had been hovering at the back of his mind. _He was so certain TR-4022 wouldn’t find anything because he can sense that there’s nothing else alive out here. Wonderful._

Hux sits up, reluctantly, rolling his shoulders. “Thank you, TR-4022,” he says. “Sit for a while. Rest if you want, I’ll wake you before we leave.”

“Thank you, sir.” The Stormtrooper sits a respectful distance away, settling back against a rock and pulling off his helmet.

“He’s right, isn’t he?” Hux asks Ren quietly. “We’re the only things alive in this desert.”  
  
Ren pauses to adjust a circuit on his lightsaber before popping the last panel back into place. “For at least five-hundred kilometers,” he says. “Maybe more.”  
  
Hux leans back until his head hits the rock with a solid _smack_. He does it again for good measure - _smack-_  as if that’ll make an answer to their problem fall out. “Well, I’m open to suggestions, if you have any."

The only thought that surfaces is this: they weren’t going to make it back to the ship. They were going to die on this hateful little rock _and he didn’t even have breakfast before he left._  
  
Kylo Ren is looking at TR-4022 thoughtfully.  
  
“It occurs to me, General,” he says mildly. “That _we_ have food.”  
  
Hux looks at Ren. Follows his gaze to TR-4022.  
  
“Ah.”  
  
Hux considers, but only briefly. He wasn’t one of the youngest Generals in the First Order because he was unable or unwilling to make sacrifices.  
  
He nods once.

There’s a low hum of Ren’s lightsaber igniting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my defense, Hux and Ren are sort-of terrible people.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: non-graphic cannibalism, bad puns, and something that vaguely resembles fluff.

It was not, Hux considered, the worst thing he’d ever done.  
  
In fact, it didn’t even rank as the worst thing he’d done this week. Which probably said more about him than he would have liked.

Luckily, his conscience had always been a thing that he could switch on and off at will, as easy as putting out a light. It was the first skill he’d learned after the Academy; how to smile and laugh and seem to care, right up until the moment that caring no longer benefited him.   


* * *

  
  
“Where did you learn to do this?” Hux asks, some time later. The two of them are clustered around a pitifully small campfire, struck with the heat from Ren’s lightsaber and some strips of the insulating foam from their ship that Hux had carried in his makeshift pack. Their supper is roasting over the fire. The rest of what Hux is tentatively thinking of as ‘rations’ has been laid out to dry on a large stone. Ren’s idea.

He’s not entirely sure he wants to know the answer to his question, but surely anything will be better than this awkward silence.  
  
Ren stares at him, expressionless, for long enough that his skin starts to crawl. “Self-reliance is a part of my training,” he says finally, just when Hux is beginning to reconsider the many merits of awkward silences. After a moment’s hesitation, he adds, “And we used to go camping when I was young.”  
  
“Camping?”  
  
“It’s when you-“  
  
“ _I know what it is_ ,” he grates out. “I can’t picture you doing it.”  
  
Ren doesn’t answer. He never has been one for small-talk. The first time Hux had met the man, he’d thought to give Snoke’s favorite an official welcome by hosting a formal reception with a handful of his senior officers. He’d thought it would make a good first impression. What he’d got had been Kylo Ren sitting awkwardly at a dinner table, giving hostile, monosyllabic answers to questions and refusing to remove his helmet even long enough to eat until, one-by-one, everyone else had stopped eating too out of sheer discomfort. As a finishing move, halfway through the dinner Ren had simply gotten up and walked out. Their relationship, such as it was, had only gone downhill from there.

Hux sighs, vaguely irritated at being forced to work both ends of the conversation. He missed TR-4022 already.  “Where did you go camping?”  
  
“Kashyyk, mostly. Tattooine once.” There is an edge of anxiety in his voice, as if he’s being interrogated  
  
“Did you enjoy it?”  
  
“No. You know you don’t have to talk to me.” Ren says. “I’m not one of your soldiers. I don’t need you to _boost my morale_.”  
  
Hux pauses, his lips pressed together in a thin line. He considers denying it. Considers, ‘ _nonsense, I want to talk to you,’_ but they would both know he was lying. Anyway, he doesn’t think he could manage it with a straight face and so he doesn’t try. “It’s that or think about what we’re eating,” He offers, levelly.  
  
“Protein,” Ren says, with a little shrug of one shoulder.

“Oh, is that all it is?” he says, dryer than the sun-parched sand around them.

“Ultimately, yes. It’s no different than eating an animal. Out of everything I’ve done, this isn’t going to be one of the things I lose sleep over.”

‘ _One of the things.’_ Hux files that observation away for further perusal. _What_ do _you lose sleep over, Lord Ren?_

He says, “I suppose you’re right,” leaning back on his elbows and stretching his legs out alongside their fire to warm them while Ren prods at the food. The promise of a full stomach in the very near future has made him amiable, even to the likes of Kylo Ren. The insulating foam smells acrid and chemical as it burns, but it’s doing the job well enough. He ticks a small mental box of congratulations for himself on bringing it.

“I’m surprised you’re so calm,” Ren says, after a while. “Considering.” He indicates their makeshift supper.  
  
Hux frowns. “Why should I not be calm?”  
  
“He was your friend.”

“I was friendly to him. We weren’t friends. There’s a difference.” Friendship, like weather, was one of those things that happened to other people. It was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

“Is there?” To Hux’s surprise, Ren sounds genuinely perplexed.  
  
“Obviously.” He manages a wan smile as he takes a small but unhesitant bite. “You might be surprised what people will give you if you offer them something other than piss and vinegar in return, Ren. It doesn’t cost me to be nice.”  
  
“You’re never nice to me.”  
  
“You irritate me. Something which no one else manages, I might add. Congratulations.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Hux huffs an almost-laugh, “It wasn’t-“  
  
“I know,” he cuts him off, quietly.

They eat in silence, neither of them quite managing to look the other in the eye while he does so.

“This isn't bad. A bit tough,” Ren says, chewing thoughtfully.

“Well, a good soldier ought to be.”  
  
Ren snorts so loudly that he chokes on air. His shoulders shake as he makes short little gasping sounds. It takes Hux a moment to realize that he’s _laughing._  
  
“Did… did you really-“  
  
Hux frowns, pulling a face as he mentally reviews his previous statement. “…It just sort-of slipped out.”

Ren is full-out laughing now, with one fist pressed over his mouth to stifle the sounds. It isn’t a terribly menacing laugh. He snorts.  
  
The ridiculous sound of Ren’s laughter makes him snicker, shaking his head, and before he quite realizes what is happening they are both giggling like children at some immature joke. The sheer absurdity of the situation only adds fuel to his laughter- had anyone told him a few days ago that in the very near future he would be laughing with Kylo Ren, over a terrible pun of all things, he would have had them sent for reconditioning. And yet, here they are.  
  
They don’t go much further that evening. Hux is displeased, reassessing the distance and rate at which they will have to travel yet again, but Ren insists that their supplies will take time to dry properly. He comforts himself with the thought that, with just the two of them, they will move an estimated 8% faster.

The wind kicks up just around sunset, gaining speed and strength as it whistles through the rough outcroppings of stone where they have holed up for the night. It _howls_ , tugging at his clothes and pushing chilled fingers through the bundle he has made for himself out of his greatcoat and the cloak. Every time he thinks he has managed to secure a bit of comfort, the wind catches at a corner of fabric and yanks a new entrance for itself. It is testing his strength and his patience.

He glances up at Ren, who is asleep sitting up, leaning back against a large rock. He has hunkered down under a bit of an overhang where the stone can shelter him from the wind. It had seemed ridiculous to Hux at the time, but after what feels like hours spent fighting the elements he is beginning to reconsider. After a moment he stands, dragging the coat and cloak with him.

“Move over,” Hux says, nudging Ren with his leg. Ren shuffles sideways obligingly, only half awake, freeing up a bit of space under the overhang for Hux to sit and curl his knees up against his chest. He tucks the coat around himself, bunching it up around his shoulders to ward off the cold.

After several minutes of taut shivering as the wind buffets around the rock-face, Hux finds himself finally beginning to drift. The last thing he is aware of before sleep overtakes him is his head slipping sideways to rest on Ren’s shoulder.

He dreams about Lexander. It is the sort of pining, pathetic dream that he thought had beaten into submission years ago. Hux dreams of their first deployment together on the _Mercenary,_ fresh out of the Academy, and of slipping down the hall to his quarters in the middle of the rest cycle. About picking his way across a floor scattered with clothes and belongings in the dark, taking care not to trip over a stray belt or crush a datapad under his feet as he went. As always, he made a mental note to badger Lexander into picking up his mess when the next cycle started, knowing that no matter what he said, the conversation would end with Hux doing the cleaning. It always did, though somehow he rarely minded.

Whenever his head was buzzing too loudly with plans and counterplans and worries for him to sleep, Hux would slip into Lexander’s bed, curling up behind him and burying his face in the other man’s soft hair. Lexander had a mass of black curls that he wore up in a tight regulation tieback when he was on duty, but he left it loose when he slept. Hux loved his hair. Had. _Had_ loved his hair. He would be asleep in minutes after crawling into Lexander’s bed, lulled by the sound of his breathing.

That is what he dreams of now. Of the familiar warmth and comfort of shared body-heat and the peaceful little sounds of another person asleep beside him. It’s soft and sweet and completely deplorable. Disgustingly unfair. He has barely even thought about his first lover for years. What possible reason could there be for it to happen now?

He wakes torn between the lingering sweetness of the dream and the growing horror of someone poking around the back of his mind. Somewhere in the middle there is a fleeting sensation of Kylo Ren standing over the bed watching him and Lexander sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: Ren being a creep and Maybe Feelings? idk, sorry. :( Back to your regularly scheduled snark next chapter, promise.

A tour of memories.

* * *

 

  _Two boys, drawn in stark, exaggerated contrast to each other. One of them small and slight, with a dusting of pale freckles, the other long-boned, with dark skin and a mess of black curls that fanned out around his face. They lie awake late into the night, talking over each other in quiet voices across the divide between their two regulation beds._  
  
_“Are you insane? There’s no way one of the old Imperials could take on a Resurgent-class Destroyer. The turbolasers alone-“_  
  
_“It’s not all about firepower. You’d have to catch it first, and with the Resurgents you may as well try steering a planet. Forget-”_  
  
_“Who cares about maneuverability? That’s what the fighters are for-”_  
  
_Neither of them is aware of the tall, dark-haired man watching them with vague curiosity from the corner of the room._

* * *

 _  
The orange-haired boy is getting taller quickly. Pale wrists peek out of the sleeves of his crisply-starched uniform. He drums his fingers idly against the polished metal table, his face a mask of concentration as he struggles to at least appear intently focused on the holo showing their morning morale session and not on the dark-skinned boy across the table, who is attempting to distract him by miming falling asleep. It’s working. General Levan is a bore. He couldn’t motivate someone to piss on him if he were on fire.  
  
The boy’s datapad chimes quietly with an incoming message._ _Unseen, the man leans in to read it over his shoulder. The text says,_ Why haven’t they shipped him off to the Republic? LH.  
  
He’d bore them all to death. BH.  _the boy messages back, barely glancing down.  
  
A chime._ Exactly. Then we invade while they’re asleep. LH.  
  
Where’s the fun in that? BH.  _He smirks._  
  
_The holovid drones on, forgotten._

* * *

  
_The dark-haired boy is now an awkward, coltish young man, all long limbs and large hands. He drops his bag on the floor just inside the doorway and then proceeds to nearly trip over it as he stumbles his way to the nearest bed without taking his eyes off the datapad in his hands. It is a moment before he notices the other young man sitting on the floor, doubled over a wastebasket that he’s got clutched between his knees. His pale face is splotchy and red, his hair falling around his face. He convulses over the wastebasket and there is a hollow retching sound, but nothing comes up. It’s clear he has been doing this for a while._  
  
_“Oh, is it progress reports already?” the first says._  
  
_“Not funny, Holt.” The other replies, weakly._  
  
_Holt reaches out a hand and smooths back limp orange hair. “I know, I’m sorry. You okay?”_  
  
_A little nod as he hugs the wastebasket. “I keep telling myself that at least it can’t be as bad as last quarter.” He dry-heaves again._  
  
_Holt rolls off the bed and comes to sit behind his roommate. As he crosses the narrow space between their beds, he passes within scant centimeters of the dark-haired man who watches them, invisible._  
  
_The two boys are of a height now; both of them lean and tall. Holt folds his legs around Hux as he sits, and runs his hands over his shoulders, smoothing out the tense muscle there. “How long have you got?”_  
  
_“He’s expecting me at two.” A few deep, shaky breaths, as he leans back into the warm body behind him._  
  
_“You do this every time. He’s your father- how bad could it be?”_

 _That comment doesn’t merit a response, though it does earn a long, arch stare._  
  
_“Okay, okay, put it this way- what could he possibly say? You’ve got the best marks of anyone in our year."_

_“You're forgetting the year he had them lower my grade in stellar cartography because he decided I hadn't really earned it."_

_“It’ll be okay.” Holt presses a kiss into the other’s hair. Slips long arms around his waist. “Ten minutes. In and out. We’ll go get a drink afterwards.”_  
  
_A groan. “Yes, please.”_  
  
_“Anything I can do in the meantime?” Another kiss, this time on the tendon just below his ear._  
  
_He catches on quickly, arching his neck into the kiss. “Mm, distract me?”_

* * *

  
_The dark-haired man leans against the wall in the hallway of a ship, already bored with waiting alongside a fresh-faced lieutenant who cannot see him. The lieutenant radiates nervous energy like a small ginger sun, fussing with his sleeves and smoothing his hair down before replacing his hat for what the man counts as the eighth time ._

 _There is a sound of a blast door opening from around the nearest corner and the hallway fills with heavy footsteps. The lieutenant darts forward in the sudden influx of people and falls into step alongside a man in a science officer's uniform. His black curls are pulled back tightly in a regulation tie, and he is engrossed in a datapad. He doesn’t notice the man walking beside him until he clears his throat._  
  
_“Technician Holt,” he says, stiffly._

 _Holt does a double-take, missing a step and nearly tripping over his own feet. A slow smile breaks out across his face, “Lieutenant Hux,” he says, warmly. “I thought you were on the Valiant.”_  
  
_“I was. I requested a transfer. Didn’t I tell you?” Hux struggles not to smile, but it is a losing battle._  
  
_“It must have slipped your mind. How uncharacteristically forgetful.” They fall into step again, walking closer together than the wide hallway necessarily required. The two men jostle each other and bump elbows playfully._

 _“What’s the matter? Didn’t think I could manage without you?” Holt says._  
  
_“I am amazed the ship is still intact, to be honest.”_  
  
_They round a corner and the observer lets them go._

* * *

  
Other memories pass by in a rush. These are sharper, more tender. Watching them is like pressing your hands against a wound.

 _“Brendol.”_  
  
_“Sir.” He stands at sharp attention in Commander Hux’s spartan office. It is the first time he can remember ever requesting to speak to the man._  
  
_His father doesn’t look up from the report he’s reading. “Get on with it. I haven’t got all day.”_

 _Lieutenant Hux wonders if he can hear how loudly his heart is pounding even from across the room. “Sir, I’m told you arranged the marriage offer between Elissa and Lexander Holt.”_  
  
_“You had to ask me that in person?”_  
  
_“No, sir. I… I don’t understand why, sir.”_  
  
_Commander Hux looks up for the first time. He is a great bear of a man; as tall as his son, but twice as wide, with scar-pocked skin and eyes the same cold grey of a ship’s hull. It’s a measuring stare, and Hux cannot help but feel that he comes up wanting._  
  
_“Because you spend too much time picking up after him,” his father says. His voice is as weathered as his face. “I worked hard for my name. I made it mean something. I didn’t give it to you so you could use it to call-in favors to get your friends out of trouble.”_  
  
_“Sir, that… it wasn’t his fault. Holt is a brilliant researcher. His work on the new power system for the ion-“_  
  
_Commander Hux growls. “Which is why he’s still alive. I’m not wasteful. Your cousin could do worse for herself.”_  
  
_The younger man screws up his courage. “Sir, Holt is- he’s more than a friend to me…” his voice trails off into nothing._  
  
_His father stands, pushing back his chair, and stalking around the desk. It is all the lieutenant can do not to back away. “You think I don’t know that? Just like you think I don’t know that you transferred to the Mercenary so you could fuck him? Now you listen, boy. I don’t care who you let stick their cock in you, but the next time I put you on a ship you’re going to stay there. He’s a distraction you don’t need. Understood?”_  
  
_“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”_

* * *

 _  
_ A holovid conversation. The more irate Holt grows, the colder Hux’s voice becomes.  
  
_“Are you saying I can’t even see you-“_  
  
_“As what? Your piece on the side? Be reasonable.”_  
  
_“You can’t be serious.”_  
  
_“It’s a good match, Lexander. You’re not going to get a better offer. It’d be stupid not to take it.”_  
  
_“Since when, in all the years you’ve known me, have I cared about that?”_  
  
_“Maybe it’s time to start. I’m up for a promotion soon. I can’t keep picking up your messes forever.”_

* * *

  
A wedding.  
  
_The newly-minted Captain Hux is on his third glass of wine, lurking in the corner alongside a man that nobody can see or hear._

 _He raises a half-empty glass to his father as the man approaches him._  
  
_“Sir.”_  
  
_"Stop sulking,” his father growls a warning in his ear, leaning in close._

 _There is a flash of something that might have been defiance in the son’s cold blue eyes. “Yes, sir.”_  
  
_He finishes his drink in one long swallow and hunts down another glass. Minutes later he is standing in front of a crowd, his smile easy and his spine as rigid as durasteel, as he offers a toast to the bride and groom. Despite the wine, he doesn’t slur as he speaks passionately and at length on their union and the shining example they would provide to the First Order. He offers them hope for long lives and happiness and children. It’s a beautiful speech. His cousin beams, touched by the gesture. Lexander just looks like he wants to murder him._

_Hux finds his father's eyes from across the room, and to his surprise he is smirking with something that almost resembles pride._


	9. Chapter 9

Awareness returns to him in short bursts as systems come back online one-by-one. The stiffness in his legs and his neck. Unpleasant. Hard rock digging into the small of his back. Same. His head on Kylo Ren’s shoulder like a lovesick teenager. Deplorable.

There’s something else. The itching, back-of-the-mind sensation of another consciousness in his head. Like having something stuck in his teeth. It withdraws, skittering away as he wakes more fully, but too late to avoid being noticed.

Hux takes a deep breath and forces it out through his nose because he cannot seem to unclench his jaw. Then another. He lifts his head off of Ren’s shoulder, craning his neck a little both to ease the knots out of it and to appear nonchalant. Ren is awake, and Hux is briefly perplexed that he’s made no move to shove him off. It’s what he would have done, were the situations reversed.

Ren holds himself stiff and expectant, like he’s waiting for something.

Hux leans forward, reaching for his boots. Every movement is excruciatingly measured. Deliberate. All the while he breathes, slowly, in and out. Calm. Controlled.  
  
He doesn’t know how much of the dream Ren saw, but the sheer fact that he saw _any_ of it… Hux wants to scream. He wants to rage. To smash things, feel something break under his hands. He wants to curse every single member of Ren’s family tree right back to the first single-celled organism that had the misfortune lend its genetic material to the man.

He does none of those things. He dumps out the sand that has accumulated in his boots- calm, calm, _controlled_ \- and pulls them on, one at a time.  
  
Perhaps, if Hux is very, very lucky, Ren won’t say anything. They will both just pretend that it never happened and get on with what passes for their day. A fight couldn’t possibly benefit either of them. It was mutually assured destruction. If Ren had half the common sense of a dead tauntaun, he would just _not say anything._  
  
“What happened to him?” Ren asks.

Hux pauses for just a moment to consider the universe in which this is his life. He doesn’t bother telling Ren to stay out of his mind. All it does is undermine his authority to keep giving orders which he knows will be ignored.

“ _Who_?” he grates out, willing Ren to get the point.

“The man you were dreaming about. Lexander.”

He is unprepared for how much he hates hearing that name in Ren’s voice. Gut instinct is to recoil from the question. To snarl and snap and refuse to answer. He doesn’t want to talk about Lexander with Ren. He doesn’t want to do  _anything_ with Ren, and certainly not to spend his first waking hours dredging up the ghosts of his former lovers just to satisfy Ren’s vague, selfish curiosity.

But refusing to answer would seem too much like he had something to hide. Like he still _cared_. Hux is not maudlin. He will not let Kylo Ren get it into his head that he’s the kind of man who simpers and pines and secretly dreams about his schoolboy crush.

“I got promoted. He got married. He works in weapons research now, doing something or other,” he says dismissively, standing. When Ren says nothing he adds, “You met him. He designed the reciprocating power relays for Starkiller Base. He was the one you threw a chair at during that development meeting a few months ago.”

Ren frowns, thoughtful. “Oh. He cut his hair.”

Hux makes a vague noise in his throat, as if to say he didn’t notice. It’s better than lying.

Just when he begins to hope that Ren has let the subject drop, the bastard asks, “Did you love him?”

“I fail to see how that concerns you,” Hux snaps, shaking the sand off of his coat with a satisfying little _crack._ He is surprised by how much venom is in his voice.

“You were dreaming of him while you were asleep on my shoulder. I’d say that concerns me.” Ren stretches out his long legs, unfolding from where he sits. He is a large man. The process takes a while.

“Careful, Ren. That sounded like jealousy.” Hux gets a vicious spike of glee when what parts of Ren’s face that aren’t sunburned colour faintly pink. He was actually _blushing_. “Is there something you need to tell me?” Hux adds with mock concern, just to twist the knife.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Ren mutters, not quite looking at him.

Hux decides, quite belatedly, that he likes him much better without the mask.

He’d made it his business to learn to read Ren’s mood by his body language alone. More out of self-preservation than genuine interest. It wasn’t exactly hard. Most of Ren’s moods were variations on a theme of Murderous Anger. The only real difference was the intensity. To think that all this time, accompanying those clenched fists and that tense set of his shoulders, there was a petulant little moue and flushed pink cheeks hiding behind that mask. Hux is never going to take his tempers seriously again.

Perhaps that was the reason for the mask.  

Ren stalks off, disappearing behind an outcropping of rocks. To relieve himself, Hux presumes. It could be to commit ritual suicide for all Hux cares at the moment.

He busies himself with spreading his coat out on the rock and transferring their little pile of supplies to it, stacking them neatly to minimize the amount of space they took up. A few more pieces of insulating foam. The laser spanner. The contents of the medkit. A long coil of thick copper wiring, as well as a few other odds and ends he’d thought might prove useful. The targeting crystals from the shuttle are wrapped up in his uniform jacket and dress shirt to cushion them and placed at the very center of the pile.

When he is nearly finished, Ren returns. Absent just so long as there was tedious work to be done and lumbering in just when he’s no longer needed. As usual.  
  
“Where’s the water?” he asks.  
  
Hux tosses it to him with more force than is strictly necessary. Ren catches it neatly, one-handed. It takes all of Hux’s practiced self-control to keep from sneering. He focuses on folding up his coat, neat military corners, until their supplies are secure and he can tie it across his chest.

When he’s done drinking, Ren stands there, useless, his hands clenching and unclenching. He huffs a sigh.  
  
“I don’t see why you’re so angry,” Ren sulks, when his dramatics fail to draw Hux’s attention.

“No, I don’t imagine you do,” Hux says sharply without looking at him. Anger lashes through him. _Control_ , he thinks. He’s no better than Ren if he doesn’t _keep control._

“I’m the one who should be mad. You were _pining_ so loudly I couldn’t sleep,”

“And you took that as an open invitation to stick your nose into my personal life?”

Ren cocks his head at him. “You’re embarrassed,” he says, as if realizing it for the first time.

“How very astute. I see why you’re Snoke’s favorite.” The sarcasm is thick enough that Ren could probably cut it with his lightsaber.

Ren opens his mouth as if to say something and then pauses. “…You think I’m his favorite?”  
  
Hux sighs. This morning just got better and better. Maybe later if he’s lucky he will just trip and smash his own brains out on a rock. It would be an improvement from how things are going now. Nowhere on his agenda for the day did he remember adding, _First thing in the morning_ : _Nurse Kylo Ren’s pathetic favoritism anxiety._

He forcefully reminds himself that without Ren, his chances of survival on this planet would drop alarmingly. It helps. Slightly.

Hux saw no shame in admitting that he respected Snoke, nor that he got a certain… satisfaction from earning his respect in return. He appreciated the favors he had earned as a result of this respect. Ren’s fanatical devotion to their Supreme Leader bordered on the obscene. He danced in circles like a trained pet, desperate for every scrap of praise thrown his way. It was embarrassing to watch.  

 “No, I think he keeps you around for your sparkling wit and charming personality.” Before Ren can open his mouth to make an angry retort Hux continues, “ _Yes_ , _you’re his favorite_ , Ren,” he says, as if he’s speaking to a particularly dim child.  
  
“I always thought he preferred you,” Ren says quietly.

 _Of course he does,_ a small, quickly-stifled part of Hux preens. _I do my job._

He says, “Thrilling as I find this conversation, can we get a move on before it gets hot? I don’t want to spend another day more than is necessary on this pathetic excuse for a rock.”

“And Ren,” he adds, in measured tones just before the man turns away. It is most definitely a mistake, but the rage coiled low in his belly is not dissipating. It begs for an outlet. “If I ever catch you in my head again…” he trails off when his voice threatens to shake. There’s no threat that seems sufficient.

“Yes?” Ren prompts, his eyes and his voice hardening. Without his helmet and cowl they are nearly the same height, but Hux is acutely aware that Ren has twenty kilos on him and far more combat experience besides. “What will you do, General?”

Hux allows himself a brief, indulgent fantasy of picking up a rock and smashing Ren’s pouting, childish face in with it.

It’s just that- a fantasy. Hux is a realist when it comes to his martial prowess. He had hand-to-hand combat training at the Academy, for what little occasion he’s needed it, but he’d be an idiot to use it against Ren. His preferred weapons had always been his mind, a measured word in the right ear, and when those failed, a blaster- only one of which was available to him here. Kylo Ren’s primary job duty was murder. In any semblance of a fair fight, Ren would tear him to pieces.

Which, of course, merely meant that Hux had no incentive whatsoever to fight fair.

“I’ll think of something,” he says coldly, meeting Ren’s eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a pain in the behind to write and I'm still not entirely sure why.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited on 5/1 because I belatedly realized I was unhappy with some sections.

“Stop that,” Ren snaps, when Hux has completed his fifty-seventh circuit of their camp. “You’re making me dizzy.”

He doesn’t talk to Ren. Talking to Ren would only make him angry, and being angry at Ren is a waste of energy. Technically speaking, pacing circles around the perimeter of their sleeping area is a waste of energy too. He should save his strength, save his stamina for when they are ready to move on. Every step is fuel consumed. Resources wasted. But the pacing at least makes him feel better. Talking to Ren would not.

It’s late in the afternoon. The sun is already creeping below the high rock face that makes up one side of their camp on the edge of the ridge. Another day lost.

On the sixty-eighth circuit, Hux pauses. “How much longer?”

He can’t calculate the necessary revisions to their journey time until Ren tells him when they can leave. Ren knows this.

“The same as last time you asked.”  
  
Hux sighs through his nose, lacing his fingers together behind his neck like a prisoner. The skin there is boiling-hot where the sun has slowly crept even through the thick material of Ren’s hood. He is briefly envious of Ren’s long hair.

They have been waiting for their ‘rations’ to dry in the desert heat since early morning. The whole thing seems thoroughly unsanitary to Hux, but Ren insists the results will be, if not palatable, then at least edible.

Eventually.  
  
“I thought you said you had done this before,” Hux accuses.

“A few times when I was a kid. I remember what it should look like when it’s done.”  
  
“But not how long that will take.”

“No. I told you that.” Ren picks at his nails, lounging insolently back against a rock. He doesn’t sound particularly troubled.

Hux wants to scream. He breathes deeply through his nose- three times, in and out- and starts pacing again instead. Nearly three full days lost already. Three days off of his original three-week estimate.

“At this rate, if we can leave in the morning, and _if_ we can maintain a constant pace with no interruptions, we might just be able to make it with only a day added to our overall time,” he says more to himself than to Ren. The act of planning has always comforted him. A plan implied control.  
  
If. The word sticks in his head like someone is mashing down on a broken keyboard. _If if if if if-_

“We won’t. There’s no point in all these projections. We'll get there when we get there. The universe doesn’t run on your timetables, General.”

 _It should._ He thinks sullenly. Childish.  
  
That’s not factoring in any issues once they make it to what passes for civilization on this worthless rock. He will still have to engineer a means of communicating with the Order and hope that there’s a ship in range to pick them up. Weeks could easily spin out into months. Months away from his ship, away from his duty, with the Order already in chaos from the sudden loss of Starkiller Base. Months that the Resistance could be using to do  _anything,_ while he is stuck here on this hateful planet, with only Kylo Ren for company.   
  
“Can you just go and check again?” Hux asks over the panic rising in his chest.  
  
“If you want to risk getting sick off of it, be my guest. How much time will the flux add to your estimates?” Ren snaps, frustrated. He sits, stretching his long legs out in front of him so that Hux is obliged to either alter his path around the perimeter or step over them.

It is the sheer, petty, thoughtlessness of the act that pushes him over the edge.

Nails digging into his palms, Hux turns and walks blindly into the maze of rock formations just outside their camp. It's that or do something stupidly regrettable, like try to break Ren's nose before Ren snapped him in half with the Force.   
  
“Where are you going?” Ren calls after his retreating back.  
  
Hux ignores him. Ren’s voice is the last thing he wants to hear right now. That arrogant, selfish, _thoughtless-_ he kicks a loose stone in his path and is satisfied when it makes a loud _crack_ bouncing off a boulder. The sound reverberates back and forth across the towering walls of stone around him. 

Neither of them have explored far beyond the place where they slept last night. The low rock formations around their camp grow into a high ridge, craggy edges jutting out so that the path along the ridge twists out of view. On the opposite side, scattered rocks the size of ships make a sort of uneven canyon. Hux follows it, aimlessly, not particularly caring where he was going at the moment so long as it was away from Ren.

It didn’t matter how long it took. It might be years. He was getting back to his ship, if only so that he could shove Kylo Ren out of an airlock. He didn’t care if Snoke had him demoted for it. He’d spend the rest of his life scrubbing out trash compactors with the sanitation crew just to watch Ren struggle and writhe in his last moments.

It was Ren’s fault they had crashed here. _Ren’s fault_ they were days behind schedule. _Ren’s fault_ he was here instead of on his ship, where he belonged. Hux kicks at another rock, but the angle isn’t right and this one only skitters a little way down the path ahead of him. Unsatisfying. That was Ren’s fault too.

When he catches up to it, Hux bends over, picks up the offending rock, and hurls it at the boulder. That impact was better. Strangely satisfying. He picks up another stone.

It’s Ren’s fault he’s angry. He isn’t an angry man. He was hardly ever angry, before he met Kylo Ren. There was no point to it. Emotions only got in the way of his work. 

This time, the rock clips an edge off of the boulder.

Anger was messy, pointless, childish. _It accomplished nothing._ His father's voice.  

The muscles in his arm are starting to burn from the repeated exertion. It's a satisfying ache.

Ren was always angry. 

Hux has a brief, fantastical image of Ren’s anger leeching into him while they slept. He imagines it as a living thing, reaching out to strangle him. Or perhaps when Ren had crawled into his mind he had left some of his anger behind, like a stain. No amount of scrubbing would get it out.  
  
Hux wings another rock, this time off of the cliff face. It makes a sharp _crack._  
  
It was Ren’s fault his base- _his life’s fucking work_ \- was destroyed in what should have been his moment of triumph. _Crack!_

Ren’s fault for letting that girl escape. _Crack!_

For engaging in petty family squabbles when he should have been _doing his fucking job_ and stopping the Resistance. _Crr-rack!_  
  
_Ren’s fault-_

He pauses, another rock already clutched in his hand, as the sound of something breaking slowly penetrates his rage-fogged mind. There is a shifting, grinding sound from somewhere above. Pebbles tumble down the cliff face, making a sound like rain. They hit the ground and bounce off of his boots. A handful strike his shoulders, and he raises a hand to protect his face. He fleetingly wishes he had his hat. The setting sun is in his eyes.

There is another grinding sound, deeper this time, and a large section of the cliff face detaches itself. It almost seems to move in slow motion, like watching a holovid at half speed, pulling away from the rest of the cliff and leaning slowly, slowly downwards towards him.

And then it isn’t moving slowly at all. Hux doesn’t have time to move, barely has time to draw a breath, before the massive chunk of rock is tumbling down, end-over-end, straight towards him.

Hux had never put much thought into his own death. If pressed, he supposed he would prefer to die courageously in battle as his ship was destroyed, or else in bed in some cold, sterile medical bay, the way his father had. Making an undignified squawking sound and falling flat on his arse as a massive boulder barreled down to crush him would not have featured anywhere on the list.  
  
Slowly, Hux realizes that he is still alive to be having these thoughts, and as such he appears to have made a miscalculation somewhere.

“Are you alive, General?” Ren asks.

Hux waves a hand to clear the cloud of rock dust around him. Coughs. Turning his head to the side, he can just make out a tall, messy-haired figure approaching him in the sunlight. “So it seems.” He coughs again. Ren is standing in the sunlight, while he is lying on his back in a cloud of dust and shadow. After a moment, Hux realizes it is dark because a hunk of rock half the size of a TIE fighter is hanging over him, seemingly suspended in the air. It's close enough that Hux could reach up and touch it.

Adrenaline kicks in, punching him hard in the gut, and he scrabbles backwards. His palms are scraped bloody, but he barely notices as he drags himself on his backside out from under the hovering ton of rock

“It’s alright. I’ve got it.” Ren says, careless. He holds it in place with the Force, one arm lightly extended. The boulder that nearly killed him rotates slowly in the air.

Despite the prickling heat, Hux cannot stop shaking. He dry-heaves and curses weakly, trying to balance on weak arms and knees, before giving up and rolling onto his back. He doesn’t trust himself to stand. Cannot take his eyes off the massive rock hanging there, immobile. Cannot stop picturing what it would have done to his body if Ren hadn’t-  
  
Saved him. The words fit together unevenly. Ren saved him.

When they get back to their camp, the sun has set and the evening cold has set in. Ren glowers but doesn’t complain about Hux hogging both the cape and his greatcoat, piling them up over his shoulders and wrapping them around himself. He is still shivering, for reasons that have nothing to do with the temperature. He hates himself, dimly, for the weakness- he's had close calls before- but all he can think about is that rock hanging over him, close enough to touch. If Ren had reacted even a second later… If he hadn't been there at _all_.

Ren had let the boulder drop once Hux was clear of it, though he didn’t seem at all strained by the effort of holding up something so much larger than himself. Hux had nearly pissed himself when the ground shuddered beneath him at the impact. He still can’t get the heavy sound of it out of his head.

“General?” Ren asks, somewhere in between disgust and concern. “Do you want me to start a fire?”

“No,” Hux manages, dragging his thoughts back on track. He sounds weak, reedy. Clears his throat and tries again. “No, we shouldn’t waste the resources.”

Ren makes a noncommittal sound and goes back to rummaging through their supplies. He returns with the water condenser, handing it to Hux wordlessly.

Hux accepts it, unspeaking, but doesn’t drink. It is grounding, somehow, just to hold it in his hands. He feels hollow inside- the aftermath of the adrenaline.

They sit together in the dark and the silence.

“You saved my life,” he says to Ren eventually, turning the words around in his head. His voice sounds as empty as he feels.

Ren pauses. “Yes. Did you expect that I wouldn’t?”

Hux opens and closes his mouth a few times before any sound comes out. “I… well, yes. You could have… You didn’t have to. I don’t…” He isn’t sure where he’s going with this thought process and so he stops talking. Swallows hard.

He can feel Ren watching him in the dark. When he speaks, he sounds like he’s explaining the intricacies of particle physics to a particularly dim child. “General, if I wanted you dead, you would be.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The guys continue to not be horrible to each other.

Hux gets his wish the next day, and more thoroughly than he ever could have wanted. They walk.

Bright, burning days slip into freezing dark nights, which then cycle into days again, back and forth; a tedious binary system. It loses its novelty quickly, and then all that’s left is the walking.

He had always thought himself in decent enough shape, physically. There was rarely enough free time in his schedule to waste much of it in the gym, but he was on his feet for most of the day anyway, in one capacity or another.  
  
By the end of the third day, his feet and shoulders ache near-constantly from carrying their pack. The muscles in his thighs burn even when he isn’t moving, and wobble threateningly when he is. It’s a toss-up between what keeps him awake more- the dull ache in his legs, like a massive bruise, or his sunburned skin.

Naturally, Ren has not uttered so much as a sound of complaint. Worse- some time on the fourth day he actually asked, with casual indifference, if Hux needed him to carry their supplies for a while.

Not simply if he _wanted_ Ren to carry the pack for a while. Hux could have agreed to that without much shame.

 _Needed_. Implying necessity or requirement.

Hux had ground his teeth together and grit out a refusal. He would sooner fight a rancor than admit to being exhausted and sore before Ren does, and there was a comprehensive list of things he would do before he needed Kylo Ren to carry his things for him- like a dainty maiden from an old Imperial holodrama, in need of a big strong man’s assistance- the very top of which was ‘Die, painfully (see attached list for methods)’.

So he suffers and aches and fantasizes about requisitioning a hoverboard once he’s back on the ship like some decadent New Republic senator and simply never walking anywhere again for the rest of his life.

He distinctly remembers being able to do this sort of thing all day back at the Academy. Forced marches across every backwater Outer Rim planet within a day’s shuttle of Arkanis were a regular part of the curriculum, meant to build up their stamina and endurance. He didn't much like it at the time, but he was good at it, as he was at everything. Somewhere over the years, all of the muscle he had built up as a cadet has slipped away. He loathes himself now for not keeping it up.

After passing through some sort of narrow canyon, they’ve left behind the sea of endless red-gold sand for a ridge, sporting assorted variations on piles of dull brown rocks and craggy little hills. The ridge seems to run precisely along the line of latitude they are following to the city, though it splits far into the distance, becoming a jagged cliff. They will have to choose, when they are closer, whether to follow the high path or the low.

Hux still feels shaken, stripped bare and disjointed following his unexpected brush with death. His nerves jangle and distract him with pointless thoughts. He tries to focus his mind on work. On everything he is going to have to do when he returns. From replacing all of his things, which were undoubtedly tossed out as soon as he was declared officially dead, to voiding his own death certificate and tactfully, discretely eliminating whoever has moved into his seat on the security council. It’s familiar. Soothing. He lines them all up in his mind- an orderly little To Do list simply awaiting his safe return to First Order territory.

He very specifically, deliberately does not think of Kylo Ren. The fact that Ren saved his life, nor the surprised, almost amused look on his scarred face when he told Hux he didn’t want him dead. Coming from Ren, that was practically a proclamation of undying love. It’s nothing he has the mental faculty to process on quarter-rations.

On yet another in an endless parade of tedious, hot days, they stop to rest in the shade of a large boulder, just before mid-day.

Hux drags the hood of Ren’s cape – it’s still _Ren’s cape_ in his mind, he can't take mental ownership of anything so ridiculous, even if it is useful _-_ back as soon as he’s in the shade, eager to have the stifling hot thing off of his head.

Ren settles heavily within half a pace of him, breathing loudly through his mouth. He holds out his hand, palm upraised, in what has become their silent code to pass the water condenser. Hux pulls his coat between his knees and rummages around in it until his hand closes around the reservoir, water sloshing around inside it. It’s a little over halfway full.

Hux swallows down a few mouthfuls just to wet his dry throat before putting it in Ren’s hand.

Ren swallows noisily when he drinks, gulping water like a drowning man. When he’s finished, he pants, then pauses, “Do you want the rest?” he adds as an afterthought.

It’ll be hours again before the condenser refills itself, and even though he isn’t particularly thirsty at the moment he has half a mind to say ‘yes’ out of simple common sense, before the unwelcome image of that boulder hovering in mid-air, suspended over his fragile, infinitely crushable body pops into his mind.

Hux shakes his head. Ren can have the rest.

But instead of swallowing the rest of the water, Ren sets the condenser aside and reaches behind to tug his undershirt off over his head. Sweat gleams on his shoulders, sticking the fabric to his tacky skin. A galaxy of pale freckles and darker moles, like constellations, dot his back.

Ren balls the black fabric up in his lap and carefully tips the rest of the water onto it. With a care that seems belied by his overlarge hands, he crumples it to work the water through it, ensuring that no drop is wasted, then twists it up. He wrings the shirt out, water trickling down his bare arm in thin rivulets and pattering to the dust-dry ground.

“What?” Ren asks mildly, catching Hux watching him.

For just a moment he feels wrong-footed, as if Ren has caught him doing something shameful. “Nothing,” he says quickly. _Too quickly_ , a warning buzzer sounds in his mind. “That’s a useful trick.”

A little cant of Ren’s head. “It’s better than nothing.”

He would like to be angry at the waste of a limited resource, but the thought of doing this himself as soon as there’s more water- of having clothes that were, if not clean then at least _cleaner_ \- makes him near-giddy.

Ren drapes his damp shirt over his shoulder and leans back, trying to cram as much of his bulk into their meagre shade as he can. His eyes slip closed.

With his shirt off, Hux notices for the first time that the scar on Ren’s shoulder, the continuation of the line bisecting his face, is red and irritated. The new tissue is shiny, the edges inflamed. It's been rubbed raw.

His eyes skim over Ren’s torso to the larger impact-wound on his side. The one that looks like it came from a blaster-shot. Hux had seen them both still fresh and bleeding when he dragged Ren off of Starkiller, and is startled at how little they've healed. Starkiller seems like eons ago. In truth, it's been just over a fortnight. 

That one is almost as bad. It looks painful. Angry reds and pinks speak to continual irritation of the wound, with the puckered edges of it crusted in flakes of dried blood.

Ren’s eyes slit open, as if he sensed the weight of Hux’s thoughts on him. One hand curls, almost defensively over the scar on his side, shielding it from Hux’s eyes.

“That looks irritated.”

“It’s fine,” Ren mutters. “My shirt keeps rubbing against it.”

“You should have said something. I have the bacta from the medkit.” The pack is still sitting between his knees. Hux digs around in it for the little jar of ointment he’d seen earlier.

“Don’t waste it. I’ve had worse.”

“I’m sure you have. Medical care isn’t a competition, Ren.”

Retrieving the fist-sized jar, Hux screws it open and scoops a quarter of the contents onto his fingers.

“If you scrape open that wound again it could become infected, and then both of us are quite thoroughly fucked. You are one of my assets on this planet, and I intend to keep you in good working condition.”

Ren huffs, amused. “You make me sound like a droid.”

“You would be a terrible droid.” Tongue catching between his teeth in concentration, Hux dabs a bit of the bacta first on the scar on Ren’s shoulder, tracing the long angry slash of it with his fingers. Ren stiffens at the contact.

Redistributing the gel over his fingertips, he leans over and reaches around Ren’s body to carefully apply the rest of it around the puckered edges of the impact wound.

“I’ve often thought it might be nice to be a droid,” he says idly. “I wouldn’t have to eat or sleep. Think of how much I could get done.” It's a nice fantasy, one that has kept him company on more than one late night, when his mind ached to surpass the limits of his exhausted body.

“I can- do you want me to do that?” Ren asks, sounding suspicious and vaguely alarmed.

It strikes Hux quite suddenly that he is half-dressed, leaning half-over Kylo Ren’s shirtless body and pawing gently at his abdomen, and that this is not, officially speaking, an appropriate position for a First Order General and a Knight of Ren.

But allowing himself to react, to stutter and lean back as if he’d been scalded by the realization, would be _admitting_ that there is basis for Ren to be alarmed. That Hux is in any way aware of the heat radiating off of Ren’s body and the way Ren’s breath is coming in humid little puffs on the side of his face.

A little note of irritation pops up in the back of his mind. He’d thought he was done having to crush _those sorts_ of ideas from his staff, once word got around about his preferences.

“No need. It’s already on my hand,” he says levelly. It’s a pathetic excuse to his own ears, but maybe Ren will fall for it. “We shouldn’t waste the bacta.”

He finishes coating the edges of the wound quickly, perfunctorily, and leans back. Ren settles himself back into the shade easily.

There is a thin smear of film left on his fingers, so Hux rubs it on the back of his own neck, where the sun has done the worst damage, just to make use of it.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ren is confused, and Hux wonders what is this thing the humans call 'friendship'.
> 
> (Holy shit did it really take me three months to update this? I'm so sorry.)

He isn’t sure if it’s his imagination, or if the nights are getting colder. Perhaps it’s just the heat that’s leeched permanently into his skin, making the air seem chilly in contrast.

The high ridge leaves them perilously exposed to the wind, which howls across the weather-blasted landscape like some vengeful beast. It isn’t strong enough to make Hux fear for the surety of his footing, but it is a constant irritation; tugging at the cloak and his increasingly-filthy jodhpurs, pushing, streaking across the exposed parts of his face until his eyes water, cutting long tracks in the grime that has accumulated on his skin until he continually looks like he’s been crying.

He knows this because Ren is no better, though he suffers the added indignity of having to continually spit tangled strands of his own long hair out of his mouth. Until recently the sight might have amused him, but mocking Ren’s misfortune seems… wrong, somehow. It would be rude, considering the intimacy of their situation. The sharing of these thousand petty little indignities, sunburns and tangled hair and the smell of each other’s sweat, is a kinship between them. It ties them together, allies- not by choice, perhaps, but allies nonetheless- against a hostile enemy. They are all the other has, here.

The muscles in his thighs still cramp with the effort of hiking for hours on end, day after tedious day, but after the initial period of wobbliness passed he finds that he can largely endure the pain. There’s no other choice. Delaying isn’t an option, and neither is surrender. So he pushes on, pushes through. The pain a bright warning klaxon at the back of his mind- an incessant reminder of the damage he is doing to his exhausted, overheated body- but one which he can work around, dismissing it like a low-priority comm message that he simply doesn’t have the time to deal with right now.

In the meantime, he does what his father always told him and _toughens up._

 _Toughen up._ Two words he heard so many times in his youth that he can no longer imagine them in any voice but his father’s. _Stop crying. Endure. It's only pain._

Hux knows that he had the misfortune to be born a skinny, soft-willed little boy, full of tears and whining excuses, into a world that had time for neither. He is able to look back on it now with only mild embarrassment, like seeing an old holophoto of himself with an awful haircut. Looking back from his place of security, safely on the other side of such a disaster, to ask _what in the hell was I thinking?_

Fortunately, his father had a singular talent for turning soft, useless little boys into men the First Order could be proud of.

Lost in thought, Hux barely notices that the sun has started to drop below the horizon, drenching the empty desert around them in darkness. Black against black, save for the lengths of his bare arms, he misses Ren stopping until he nearly collides with him.

“Should we stop here?” Ren doesn’t glance back. They usually stop at dusk.

The area around them is hardly different from any of the featureless brown landscape ahead, or behind them. Scratching idly at the scruff that’s growing in along his jaw, Hux assesses the prospective campsite with disdain. Windswept and craggy. There is nothing particularly appealing about it, except that it might have slightly fewer rocks.

“We could continue on,” Ren says. The words tumble and collide as they spill out of his mouth. He’s grown used to the halting, awkward way Ren speaks. “It’s not so hot now, and the stars are bright enough to see by. At least— I can see. My night vision is very good. And I could lead you.”

Hux feels a frown creasing between his eyebrows as Ren fumbles his way to his point.

“We might make up for lost time,” he says, the words offered up like a gift.

Gut instinct is to dismiss the offering out of hand, considering the source. But… it’s not really  _bad_ idea. He doesn’t relish the thought of more walking, but neither is he looking forward to bedding down on the cold, hard ground, clutching his coat to himself like a blanket and trying to snatch a few fitful hours of sleep while the wind battered him about. At least if they keep walking they may get home marginally faster. And the temperature _is_ much more pleasant now, at least until the evening chill sets in. When he plumbs the meagre reservoirs of his energy, he finds enough rattling around at the bottom to go on for a few more kilometers.

“Lead the way, Lord Ren,” he say, with a halfhearted attempt at a gracious sweep of his arm. “Unless you’re tired,” he adds, a sudden afterthought. It wasn’t meant to be goading, but the words hang in the air like a taunt anyway.

“No.” Too quick. Too sharp. But Ren was the one to suggest that they continue on. He isn’t allowed to backpedal now.

“Alright, then.” Hux waits, pushing himself up on his toes to stretch the tense muscles in his ankles.

“Fine.”  
  
The darkness that has descended on them is inky-black. Almost tangible, as if Ren could reach out with his lightsaber and carve a chunk right out of it. Walking together in the dark is somehow more intimate than doing so in the blinding light of day. During the day Hux can at least distract himself with the sweeping emptiness of their surroundings. The progress they’ve made, assessments of upcoming terrain. On the shadowy ridge, the darkness presses in close, and the world seems to narrow to just the two of them. Hux trailing along behind Ren like a baby quadduck after its mother, and the steady placing of one foot after the other. Nothing else exists beyond the two of them. Even his own breathing seems obscenely loud in the darkness.

“Careful here,” Ren mutters, his voice low, as if he felt the irrational urge to keep quiet too. “There’s a step.”  
  
Predictably, Hux misjudges the depth of it, and there is a horrible moment where he gropes around in the air for the ground with his foot, his stomach giving a wobbly little lurch when the weight of the pack tips his balance forward. He stumbles, turning his ankle on the landing, but before he can overbalance and fall flat on his face, a strong hand closes around his bicep, holding him upright.

“Careful,” Ren repeats, startled.

“Thank you,” Hux mutters, out of habit. Sharp pain flares through his ankles at the first step, but it holds his weight. He keeps moving. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. He repeats it, like a mantra, until this fresh pain merges into the background along with all his other aches and discomforts.

 _It’s going to hurt._ His father had told him once. _The trick is to not let that bother you._ Brendol Hux kept one large, calloused hand on his son’s back, preventing him from squirming away as the spindly medical droid slipped a slender needle into his arm. He’d needed a lot of injections, as a boy. Immunizations, mostly. The Unknown Regions were rife with disease.

At the first pinch he’d bitten his lip, but hadn’t pulled away.

 _It’s only pain_ , Hux tells himself, limping slightly. A biochemical signal that damage has been done. Don't let it bother you. Acknowledge it and carry on.

Casting about for a distraction, he considers Ren. He is a black shape in the darkness, picking his way over the rough terrain with a grace that belies his large frame. A contradiction, like so much of him.

That little part of Hux’s mind that is always quietly ticking away, assessing, planning, turns Ren’s offer over in his head, examining it from every angle. It was a peace offering, he’s sure of that much. Or Ren’s awkward, untried version of one, anyway. Offering a way to make up for the time they had lost. Something he knew Hux desperately craved  
  
Ulterior motives? None that he could think of, unless Ren was using him as an excuse, hiding his own desperation to get home. But if that were the case, Hux thinks he would have noticed. Ren is not that good of a liar. His eyes are too honest.

Which meant it was likely a genuine offer. But why? Ren has never shown any interest in currying favor with him before. It was a little late for an apology, for… anything that had passed between them, really.

It wasn’t the first time on this planet that Ren had done something unnecessarily frivolously considerate, with no apparent motive. Saving his life Hux can chalk up to the fact that he is useful to the Order, and to Leader Snoke. But Ren had used his magic nonsense to heal Hux’s headache the other week, and now he is fighting his own exhaustion to push on in the dark, because Hux wants to get home faster. Why?

Because Hux had been nice to him?

The realization crystallizes slowly, parts slotting into place. Before Ren cured his headache, Hux had stopped him from wandering off in a fit of heat exhaustion. Had helped him with his clothing. And then there was the incident with the bacta, which Hux prefers not to think about in too much depth.

The clumsy childishness of it is almost endearing. Kylo Ren, butcher and monster and master of an ancient order of dark sorcerers, responded to little kindnesses in turn, even as he seemed oblivious to larger things like basic human decency. Hux had done him a small favor, and he felt compelled to return it. It made sense, of course, considering the slavish way Ren begged for attention from Leader Snoke. He craved attention, coddling, like a child did sweets. Perhaps he hoped that Hux would continue to indulge him?

Hux resolves to test his theory when they finally stumble to a stop, unknown hours later. The area where they decide to sleep is relatively flat, with few rocks and a thin layer of soft clay on the ground that has somehow managed to avoid being blown away by the ever-present wind. As far as their options for places to sleep go, it’s practically one of those posh hotels on the Core Worlds, with Naboo-silk sheets and little mints on the pillows.

Narrowly resisting the temptation to smirk at his own deviousness, Hux goes through his usual nightly rituals. Unpacking their supplies from his coat, pointedly thinking of nothing while he chokes down his rations, stripping off his boots and splashing a small handful of their precious water on his face to get the worst of the grime off. He misses brushing his teeth. And shaving. And the comfortingly clean smell, like fresh water and sanispray, of his refresher back on the _Finalizer._

As he does this, Ren skulks around the periphery of their camp, poking around in what Hux thinks is a frankly unnecessary security measure. The two of them are the most dangerous things in this desert, by any measure. If anything tried to invade their camp at night, he would be thrilled. It might be something they could eat.

He waits until Ren apparently deems their camp secure and settles down in one spot, pulling off his boots. While he is momentarily trapped, one foot caught in both hands, the other folded up under him, Hux walks nonchalantly over to where he is sitting, his coat and Ren’s cape folded over his arm, and drops down close beside him.

Ren pauses, one foot still in the air, frowning at him. “What?”

“We ought to share the coat, don’t you think?” Hux says, the picture of innocence. “It’s freezing.”  
  
“I don’t-“  
  
“Oh, do shut up, Ren,” he interrupts, tossing the cape over both their legs before Kylo can protest with some nonsense about having trained himself to not need warmth. Hux has seen him shivering in the night, his thick legs pulled up tight to his chest. He offers Ren half of the coat, briefly thankful for its excessive size, tucking the other half over his shoulder as he turns onto his side and pillows his bent arm under his head.

After a long, stiff moment, he feels a little tug on the corner of the coat as Ren settles himself, trying to lie as far away from Hux as the coat will allow and not succeeding in going very far. The warmth of him against Hux’s back is wonderful in the cold.  
  
“Fair warning, Ren- if I catch you in my head again, I’m dreaming about your mother,” Hux says as Ren lays down uncomfortably beside him.  
  
“You-“ Ren sucks in an offended breath. His hand twitches, clenches into a fist at his side. “You are welcome to try it, general. I never thought you were suicidal,” he says, trying for cold, aloof outrage and failing awfully. It’s nearly sweet.  
  
They lie there in close silence for a few moments as Hux fights a protracted internal battle with himself.

He shouldn’t.

He _really_ shouldn’t.

It was beneath him, it was immature, and likely to get him punched in the face on top of that.

And yet…

In the end, self-preservation suffers a devastating defeat under the combined forces of temptation and entertainment, losing half its forces to a surprise attack and slinking away with its tail between its legs.

Right as Ren is drifting off to sleep, Hux pitches his voice low and breathy, and moans, “ _Mmm_ , General Organa…”  
  
He laughs when Kylo Ren punches him hard in the hip.


	13. Chapter 13

When he finally does drift off, lulled almost gently by the hollow sound of the wind and Ren’s quiet breathing behind him, he doesn’t dream about General Organa.

As he slips into a solid, heavy sleep, he dreams that he’s back at the Academy. Having tea with his Imperial History professor, of all the ridiculous things. The gray student uniform fits awkwardly on his adult body; the belt is too low, the shoulders too tight, and the whole thing is made of a dreadful polyblend that manages to fail at every desired characteristic of clothing, in that it is neither comfortable nor fashionable nor really much protection against the elements.

Old Captain Elba- though the rank was largely a formality, since the man hadn’t set foot on a warship since the Clone Wars- was a friend of his father’s, and he would often invite handfuls of his top students to his office for tea and biscuits, officially as a reward for their academic achievement. To Hux it seemed like a ham-fisted attempt to ingratiate himself with the next generation of high-ranking officers; an investment in good will from those who would eventually be giving him orders. It was clever, even if he despised the feeling of being cozied up to. He wasn’t a child, he didn’t need a pat on the head and a sweet to motivate him to do a good job.

But he went, dutifully, because his father expected him to. Because he _was_ one of Elba’s top students, because, as father said, his absence would imply to his classmates that he wasn’t _worth_ ingratiating himself with, and because the biscuits were, quite frankly, amazing. Illegal contraband smuggled in from the decadent New Republic, where it was rumored that things like sugar rationing and draconian import restrictions were unheard of. Even years later, he remembers them with heady longing. Perfectly soft, coated in rich chocolate- not the artificial kind that came in tiny, plasteel-hard chunks on his dinner tray on Empire Day and his birthday- and sweetened with so much sugar they made his teeth ache.

He had considered tracking down some of his own, once he made general. Every ship the size of a star destroyer had a thriving black market business in contraband, most of it, shamefully, from the New Republic. There was always someone who knew how to get what you were looking for. Surely if he could figure out the brand… but it had always felt like setting a bad example. And for so frivolous an indulgence.

Even when he can no longer remember Elba’s face, Hux will still have dreams about those chocolate biscuits.

Words wash over him, indistinct and lulling. The other boys are talking, Elba is laughing, and somewhere, Hux is dimly aware of the sound of rain pattering against the stone roof. It blends into the muddle of sounds at first, unremarkable. Comforting, almost. It used to rain near-constantly on Arkanis. Most of his dreams of the Academy are accompanied by the omnipresent sound of storms.

This time, something about the rain nags at him. Something simple. Something he shouldn’t have forgotten.

As he listens, trying to tune out Cadet Moret’s nasal voice, he thinks he hears a sound buried under the rain. A shrill scream, like a child’s voice, quickly silenced.

The others ignore Hux as he gets up and presses his ear to the door, frowning. He doesn’t have to wait long. The sound comes again, another scream half-hidden under a roll of distant thunder.

He remembers, quite suddenly, what he had forgotten- that the other side of this door does not lead to outside, and thus he should not be able to hear rain on the other side of it.

Hux opens the door. Where there should be the Floor Two East Corridor, there is instead a muddy field, ringed with looming trees, like skeletal fingers twisting up towards the sky.

Cold wind plucks at the lapels of his student uniform, tugging him out of the doorway, away from his professor’s warm, comfortable office. Out here it is chaos and pitch dark and pouring rain; everything a mess of indeterminate black. Shadowy. Frightening. The ground is a sea frozen into place in the middle of a storm, all jagged shapes and violent swells.

As he tries to make sense of what he’s seeing, lightning splits the sky, illuminating, in a there-and-gone flash, a scene of carnage. For a split second, the upthrust black shapes littering the ground reveal themselves as scores of corpses, some of them blood-splattered or blackened as if by fire, before the darkness devours them again.

Hux steps forward cautiously, his boots squelching in what he pretends is only mud. 

Some of the bodies are small, he realizes. There’s a tragically brittle sound as a thin bone cracks under his boot.

At the edge of his vision, in the periphery of the field, something is moving. Shadows with long limbs and longer robes, black-on-black in the darkness and moving like something in a dream. Something about them fills him with a bone-deep dread- he is aware, suddenly, with the unfounded surety of dreams, that he must not draw their attention.

His gaze is drawn to movement ahead of him in the field. Not one of the wraith-like figures, this one is different- a man in shabby black hunches on hands and knees, picking through the mess, searching for something.

Another flash of lightning reveals that the man is Kylo Ren.

Rain sticks his dark hair to his face in soggy tendrils and drags at his cloak, soaking it until it hangs limp and heavy over his shoulders. He might be crying. It is impossible to tell, with the rain.

Hux steps over the body of a Twi’lek in mud-stained beige robes. Something has sliced her neatly in half, diagonally from shoulder to belly. Her left arm lies some distance away from the other two pieces, hand still reaching out in supplication.

Ren is bent to his task, pawing through the muck that reaches up his elbows, and doesn’t acknowledge Hux at first. Watching him, Hux realizes he is checking the faces of the bodies he dredges up, looking for one in particular, as if he is both desperate to find it and unable to imagine what he will do when he does.

Hux becomes aware, suddenly, without knowing quite how he knows, that Ren is looking for a little boy with dark curls and big ears and freckles.  
  
“Ren.” Hux raises his voice to be heard over the howl of the wind.

Ren looks up at him, startled, “Hux? What- what are you doing?” Shouting, his eyes are wide with alarm. “You shouldn’t be here-” His voice is cut off, swallowed up by the storm.

He looks so lost, in that moment, so afraid and terribly alone. Something wet drips off the end of his nose, though Hux cannot tell if it is rainwater or tears.  
  
“Come away from there, Ren.”  
  
“I can’t.” Ren says, swallowing. “No, I can’t, I- I have to find... I-.” With renewed energy, he returns to his task, heedless of the mud and the organic filth, not caring that it is clinging to his hands, his clothes. “You don’t understand. He’s terrified of storms…”

“Kylo. Leave it,” Hux says firmly, but not ungently. “Enough of this. Come with me.”

Ren stares up at the hand Hux offers him, lost, but after a moment he allows Hux to pull him to his feet.

He doesn’t ask where they’re going. A reluctant shadow, he follows Hux to the door, which he had left cracked open. It’s a rectangle of dim light in the darkness. A banal impossibility. The water soaking their clothes vanishes as soon as they are on the other side, as if they’ve stepped through a large air-dryer. Inside it’s warm, and with the door closed behind them the sound of the storm shifts, becoming nothing more than the distant, harmless rain of Arkanis again.

No one at tea pays any mind to Ren. They are used to Hux bringing Lexander along with him, who always took more than his fair share of biscuits but usually told such good jokes that nobody minded too much, and so they simply pass another cup and a plate and return to their chatter. Ren settles uncomfortably into the empty chair beside Hux, which hadn’t been there before. He looks around, at the other students, the walls, the cup of tea clutched in his overlarge hands, as if suddenly discovering himself on a new and fascinating alien world.

“Try a biscuit,” Hux suggests. “They’re very good.”

“This is what you dream about?” Ren asks. There is a lingering numbness in his tone, like a chill he can’t quite shake off. He takes a reluctant sip of his tea and makes a face.

“Sometimes.”

“Tea parties?”

“ _Imperial_ tea parties,” Hux corrects. He tries to divide his attention between Ren and Captain Elba, who has been slipping draughts of Corellian whiskey into his cup thinking that nobody would notice, and is now tipsy enough to start giving out the _good_ gossip on their other teachers. “For the First Order’s brightest future officers.”

Ren frowns at him, unable to determine whether he’s being mocked or not. Hux isn’t sure himself.

“Moret over there,” he says quietly, nodding to a girl with a pinched face and a tight bun, who was talking animatedly, though the words didn’t quite reach them. “She’s a lieutenant colonel now. I’m ashamed she made it that far. We once shut her in a droid closet- didn’t even lock the door mind you, just shut it- and it still took her three hours to get out.”

Ren snorts into his tea.

“And that’s Toft,” Hux gestures to a tall, skinny boy with acne spots and chocolate smeared on his lower lip, “A brilliant theoretician. Very good at simulator runs, but thoroughly useless otherwise. I always said he’d shit himself and die the first time he had a blaster fired at him.” He pauses to bite into a biscuit. “I was right. I just got it backwards.”

This earns a bark of laughter, which feels like a reward, and Hux smiles to himself, pleased. The haunted look on Ren’s ungainly face, strangely fascinating despite its overlarge features and too-soft eyes, is slowly dissipating. It makes him more pleasant to look at. Something almost close to handsome. He decides that he likes making Ren laugh.

“Corisson is the one with the terrible haircut. Looks like he got mauled by a malfunctioning droid, doesn’t he? Dreadful.”

“You’re one to talk. Is that what they called stylish at the Academy?” Ren ventures, with something like his usual mocking tone.

“I’ll have you know gray polyblend was very fashionable when I was younger.” He tugs at one of his too-wide folded cuffs, his face set.

“Was it?”

“No, of course not. We all hated them. I think that was the point. It fostered _unity_.”

Laughing seems to surprise Ren. There is something uneven and wild about it, like he isn’t quite sure how laughter is supposed to sound and is doing his best impression of something he only halfway recalls.

“You’re funny,” he says slowly. “I never realized you were funny.”

“I have many hidden depths.” Hux sips his tea.

“Yes. You do. I never realized…”

The chair is comfortable and the room is warm, and Ren seems on the verge of _saying something_ , which, knowing Ren, will be awkward and poorly-thought-out, and will utterly ruin this perfectly nice, pleasant moment. When he wakes up he's going to be miserable again, tired and in pain, although just at this moment he can't remember  _why._

“Ren?” he interrupts.

“What?”

“Just shut up and have a biscuit.”


End file.
